The Gates of Dongolaτι ουν ερουμεν?http://the-27th-comrade.appspot.com2015-09-02T10:05:51.0000The 27th ComradeAn Extremist 17 Times a DayahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICL-oYKDA2015-11-05T14:42:31.0000<p>I wonder when the World will realise that, yes, islamism is always dangerous, criminal, and a pietisation of terrorism. So, for instance, Russia <em>did</em> recognise it one point, but, <a href="https://www.rt.com/politics/320819-russian-court-reverses-ruling-recognizing/">now that less-justifiable (albeit cooler) heads have prevailed</a>:
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<blockquote><p>A court in the Russian Far East has canceled the verdict that recognized an Islamic book with abstracts from the Koran as ‘extremist material’, which caused outrage from the Muslim community and some politicians.
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</blockquote><p>This is unfortunate, because the abstracts taken out of the Qur'an are, in fact, extremist material. The poem-book of the muslims does indeed teach criminality, heresy, and terrorism; it enjoins extremist islamism, not moderate islamism.
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<blockquote><p>The initial verdict brought critical comments from Russian Muslims because the banned parts were actually abstracts from the Koran.
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</blockquote><p>This should have just caused Russia to realise, not that the judge was wrong (because the judge was right) but that the time had come to move beyond the foolish, impotent, and hopeless strategy of treating this anti-Christian heresy as though it is not a crime. It <em>is</em> a crime. Do documents inciting genocide stop being bad once the génocidaire happens to be a faithful mohameddan?
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<blockquote><p>The head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, even demanded that the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk judge and prosecutors be brought to justice for insulting the holy book and thus inciting religious hatred.
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</blockquote><p>And this is what I mean; because, you see, the faithful muslims should, must, <em>has to</em> murder or call for the murder of all who uphold Russian moral and legal standards.<br />
The Russians may be forced to back-track from their earlier truth, and to recede to error, and to cede to terrorism, and to submit to heresy; but all this is because they are post-Christian (for imagine what Ivan the Terrible, stomper on crescents, would have done to everything Chechen, by now), but also because even when they were a Christian people, they were involved in high heresy, from mariolatry and denial of the Spirit of Christ to prelacy and legalistic formalism. A nation Christian and covenanted can say to all the muslims in the World: you are wrong, you are criminal, and the sword has been unsheathed against you and your proud heresy.
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<p>One of the Chechen muslims affected by the ruling asks:
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<blockquote><p>In their statement prosecutors questioned the quotes from the Koran, but every Muslim says the words of a prayer at least 17 times. Does this make every Muslim an extremist 17 times a day?
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</blockquote><p>Yes. Yes. Seventeen times yes.<br />
The fool adds:
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<blockquote><p>Banning Suras from the Koran is like banning a Christian from reciting ‘The Lord’s Prayer’.
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</blockquote><p>No. No, you fool; a million times no. The Lord&rsquo;s Prayer, for instance, has &ldquo;Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.&rdquo; On the other hand, the muslim prayer is a repetitive extolling of a heretic who never once expressed concern for forgiveness, on top of having repeatedly been obsessed with be-headings and rape.
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<blockquote><p>“Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism are an inseparable part of the historic legacy of the peoples who inhabit Russia. Thus the Bible, Koran, Tanakh and Kangyur, their contents and their quotes cannot be classed as extremist materials,” reads the explanatory note attached to the bill.
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</blockquote><p>See the foolish kind of idiot that democratic legislatures have you stuck with! So the Germans could not have outlawed <i>Mein Kampf</i> because of how really German that hateful and heretical diatribe is?<br />
People who think they are speaking for nations and organising entire states should have more-stable principles than anything ever showed ten paces beyond the last ballot box.
</p>Ever BeahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMD-jJUKDA2015-11-02T16:45:32.0000<p>This is a good one from Kalley Heiligenthal, with Bethel Music. <i>Ever Be.</i>
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<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/byEUIzfVLAs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>It is good rock. My own rock tastes consider as the zenith such "weedy" artists as Coldplay and Keane. I will not be found rocking to most American rockers; more-likely the British. But this one here, with the video made on location in California, is quite a nice song. The singer, Kalley, also has much character and confidence.
</p>Blade-Wielding WeekahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgIDJsYgKDA2015-10-23T11:24:01.0000<p>At the start of this month, when there was an attack on a school in America by an armed man, the entire discussion was about the weapons the man had used. When he comes out to say something about it, this is <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-02/shooting-at-umpqua-community-college-oregon/6821828">what their President says</a>:
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<blockquote><p>"It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun," Mr Obama told a news conference. "We've become numb to this.
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</blockquote><p>In all the discussion, there was nobody who even dared to say this was murder. What Americans have become numbed-to is murder. They see mass-murder, they say "Guns!" They see mass-abortion, they say "Choice!" They see psychotic shooters, and they say nothing about the causes of the psychosis and the lax treatment of life--the many pharmaceutical drugs and the darwinistic worldview that these shooters are on--but they shout about the guns.
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<blockquote><p>"Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out — we need more guns, they'll argue. Fewer gun safety laws. Does anybody really believe that?"
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</blockquote><p>Of course, I do! And <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/318064-jerusalem-mayor-gun-palestinians/">so does the Jerusalem mayor</a>, in response to the rampant knife-wielding murderers. Again, if it had been stupid Westerners in charge of the response, you would have had even butter knives being banned (as is the case in Britain) on the hope that murderous criminals can be trusted to observe, obey, and follow the absurd rules that call for knife-control. Of course, then the only people with a blade on the streets would be criminals.
The good thing is that, although Israel falls for every stupid fashion the nations around come up with, in this case God over-ruled their tendency, and <a href="https://news.vice.com/article/israelis-are-buying-a-ton-of-guns-amid-current-violence">they are a well-armed populace</a>, having been preserved this time from the bitter state of 1 Samuel 13.
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<p>Gun control is stupid; murderer control, on the other hand, is common-sense. The West, of course, prefers to obsess over the weapons than to check the criminals.
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<p>So enter this week.<br />
<a href="https://www.rt.com/news/319341-swedish-school-sword-attacker/">A masked man attacks a Swedish school</a> and, wielding blades, murders and injures some people. It is then found that he had racist reasons for his murderous attack. One day later, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ugunlocked?ref=br_rs">two other schools get threats</a> of similar attacks.<br />
So far, nobody is mentioning knife-control, and that is good. Unfortunately, also, nobody is mentioning murderer-control.
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<blockquote><p>Mr Obama said other countries, such as Britain and Australia, had been able to craft laws that prevented mass shootings.
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</blockquote><p>A pity, then, that they haven't yet crafted any to punish even simple murder.
</p>Give to the Lord, Ye Families of the NationsahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMCglJQKDA2015-10-08T20:23:16.0000<blockquote><p>Ascribe to the Lord, O clans of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength!
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering and come before him!
Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness; tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice, and let them say among the nations, &ldquo;The Lord reigns!&rdquo;
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</blockquote><p>Today, I launched a very simple but very important website.<br />
<a href="http://truth.1st.ug/">truth.1st.ug</a><br />
I do not think that I have done a simpler <em>website</em> before&mdash;it is essentially a single page&mdash;and had it been any simpler, it would have been merely a <em>webpage</em>.<br />
Yet also I have never done a more-important website, because by it I call upon every Ugandan to express dissatisfaction with the prevailing secularist system.
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<p>It is called <a href="http://truth.1st.ug"><i>A General Declaration of Christian Uganda on Nation and State</i></a>, has four points to make, and, right out of the gate, it affirms that the Bible is the word of God, and therefore authoritative. One may note that even this &ldquo;axiomatic&rdquo; point is self-referential because, like the other three points, it is shored up by a citation or two <em>from the Bible</em>. However, it also states that the Bible&rsquo;s proof of being &ldquo;the Bible&rdquo; is found in the Bible itself&mdash;the Bible proves its own being-the-Bible. All authoritative documents are self-referential, but only the word of God <em>may not</em> be subjected to ultimate dependence on any other for such authority.
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<p>The next thing it states is that the secularist dispensation is illegitimate. A secularist constitution is easy enough to refute: my God versus your god. If, against the ragings and frothings of a billion secularists, I am established of God, there is no contest.
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<p>The next interesting thing in the document is that I maintain that insomuch as Uganda is a nation, she has always appeared as Christian from the dawn of her history. This, of course, cannot be contested, because the very name &ldquo;Uganda&rdquo; was coined from the mouth of a missionary, and around then Uganda was discussed as an independent polity in the British parliament (the question was whether this Uganda qualified for treaty defence from Egyptian aggression&mdash;affirmative). Before all that, in 1876, eleven months before the first CMS missionary landed, even Egypt, by the hand of Colonel Charles Gordon, recognised the independence of <em>Christian</em> Uganda in response to a fiercely Christian letter that Mutesa, the then-king of Uganda had dispatched by the hand of a humbled muslim invader.
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<p>The British queen at that time even received one of the many letters signed with Christian styles, from the Ugandan king, offering formal relations <em>on the grounds of shared Christianity</em>. The secularists of today trivialise or deny these things, but they will be their condemnation ultimately.<br />
All the interest that was then stirred up all over the World about &ldquo;Uganda&rdquo; was strictly on Christian grounds, until the British Protectorate was set up. This being a British Protectorate, sharing law and parliament with all Britain, it was necessarily Christian as Britain was&mdash;and as a result, Uganda had a Christian state for longer than it has ever had a non-Christian state.
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<p>At any rate, regardless of prevailing statecraft, Uganda, the nation, is Christian <i>de souche</i>, from first to last. We don&rsquo;t call them &ldquo;Uganda Martyrs&rdquo; for nothing. &mdash;Even though a stupid and purjurous and wicked nation denies their legacy&mdash;that Christ reign as king of kings&mdash;while feigning association with them once a year.
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<p>The last point is that islam is a criminal heresy by its very nature, and the fact that the secularist constitution tolerates it is proof-positive of the stupidity of secularism.
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<p>This is a document that I consider authoritative enough that I will be distinguishing associations based on their accesion to it. However, since it decries the secularism enshrined in the constitution, it may invite retribution against all those who express assent; but I will consider cowardice in this matter as just as bad as opposition to it. The signing of it is not difficult&mdash;name and address, please&mdash;such that no excuse remains to not sign it except that one is a secularist. I abhor such.
</p>Why Do the United Nations Rage?ahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMCWsIcKDA2015-10-03T18:01:58.0000<p>There is madness that afflicts the nations—the United Nations—because they refuse to acknowledge the King that God has set over the nations. They rage and froth at the mouth because they have refused the counsel of light that would give them a clear direction. So they go from cowardice and hypocrisy to confusion and self-contradiction.
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<p>Imagine this: the UN Human Rights Council has agreed that Saudi Arabia, which <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-executions-amnesty-international-beheadings-death-sentences-rate-under-king-salman-10470456.html">wrongfully executes a person every two days</a> (and that <a href="http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/woman-beheaded-in-broad-daylight-in-moderate-muslim-nation-while-police-watch/">wrongly</a> and <a href="https://www.rt.com/uk/318104-saudi-execution-appeal-cameron/">diabolically</a>), the same Saudi Arabia that has invaded a sovereign nation and committed <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/07/27/yemen-coalition-strikes-residence-apparent-war-crime">wanton massacres of civillians</a>, shall now <a href="http://www.rt.com/op-edge/317530-un-human-rights-saudi/">investigate its own conduct</a> on behalf of the Human Rights pretenders at the UN.<br />
On the other hand, when Israel so much as asks for a terrorist’s identification papers, everybody screams “apartheid!!!”, while nobody remembers human rights <a href="http://www.rt.com/news/317548-jerusalem-stabbing-attack/">when Israeli babies are stabbed</a> by their enemies.
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<p>Now, the fictional nation of Palestine—for there is no Palestine, only Judæa, and even Yasser Arafat (who they claim as father of their national ambitions) was born in Cairo of Egypt—has recently <a href="http://www.rt.com/news/317134-palestine-flag-unga-abbas/">got to fly its flag at the UN</a>. God did not even cause His wind to unfurl it and hallow the accursed banner—which flag betrays the fiction of the “Palestinians” by being of the same pattern as all the other flags the British designed for their Arab realms, all of which nations, such as “Iraqis”, are very recent creations.<br />
The problem with this is that the UN flew it <em>after</em> <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6620/abbas-bluff">the Palestinian head insinuated</a> that he would no longer feel bound by treaties and agreements with Israel, which ill-advised agreements are in fact the only way the Palestinians can make a credible claim to anything.
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<p>And then Russia is desperately confused. On the one hand, Russia is fighting the Islamic State (Iraq-Syria), being <a href="http://www.rt.com/news/317505-air-force-terrorists-raqqa/">the most-effective such assault</a> in the history of this principality of heresy. This is in fact in response, Russia has said, to the fact that many Chechens (whose nation is under Russian sovereignty) make up core parts of the IS(IS) outfit; the Chechens are a Muslim nation, while Russia is a historically-Christian nation. The problem is that the Russians think that the problem is “extremism”, and as such they are fighting the wrong thing; for if they knew what to fight for, they would first reduce Muslim Chechnya, and set to fire whatever insists on upholding the heresy of muhammad the arch-heretic.<br />
But because of their confusion, they now do not know what to do about the fact that Chechen heretics—extremists themselves—<a href="http://www.rt.com/politics/317393-this-will-be-holiday-kadyrov/">are requiring a part in the Russian response</a> to Chechen heretic extremists. What hath light to do with darkness?
</p>The Diabatés: Rachid OuiguiniahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMDm55oKDA2015-09-30T14:08:39.0000<p>While aloft, in the past year (and much too late for someone like myself, I think), I discovered the latest album by Toumani Diabaté and his son Sidiki Diabaté. It is named after the father-son duo, fittingly.
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<p>On the whole, I think it is just an extension of Toumani’s repertoire, and I cannot help thinking that Sidiki has not (yet) expressed himself properly. Remember what happened when Viex Farka Touré properly left the shadow of his late father; you do not really get the same sound, and those like myself who were Ali’s fans probably found Vieux a bit poor. But then he did that first album with Idan Raichel, and the same insane magic happened that Ali shared with Ry Cooder. As <i>Talking Timbuktu</i> was a massive coup and a classical achievement for Ali in World (rather than, say, simply Sahelian or Malian) music, so also <i>The Tel-Aviv Session</i> was a grand coup and a classical achievement for Vieux and Idan in World. Like father like son.
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<p>On the other hand, Toumani had his classical achievement while playing a reprise of his father’s <i>Cordes Anciennes</i> with his cousin, on <i>New Ancient Strings</i>. So, in fact, it may be that in the line of the Diabatés, God does not send down a blessing unless proper filial piety has been shown. I mean, He does not sustain seventy generations of the best string-play since David without making that, in itself, a clear statement about His expectations of Mandé <i>djeliya</i>.
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<p>This album, <i>Toumani &amp; Sidiki Diabaté</i> is a proper collaboration, and for that reason Toumani dominates. On top of being the teacher here, he is also by nature very dominating on a record. Most of it is just blasting displays of sheer virtuosity; but by now Toumani has shown us that weirdness <em>will</em> happen, and we expect it. Beyond sheer displays of excellence, there was little of note in the album. Save for one song.
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<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gRo8fCXxNsQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p><i>Rachid Ouiguini</i> is the only song there that really-really holds my attention, but man does it hold it! It is so achingly beautiful, the way it goes this way and that, up and down, fas’ and slo’ I remember noting that it justified an entire album all by itself.<br />
There is nearly nothing “Toumani” in it! —There is much Diabaté, but very little Toumani; the remainder is Sidiki. When I saw it played on a BBC clip, it was indeed Sidiki driving the song. On the sleeve, Toumani’s kora is of the ancient design, while the one of Sidiki is a more-modern design. That’s another very good sign of good rebellion. In it, I hear the stirrings of a new independent Diabaté, and it may take another album—and another collaboration with family—before Sidiki gets the classic. Maybe the Diabatés should do <i>Modern Ancient Strings</i> or the like.
</p>One Psalm and Good GovernanceahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgIDJ6J4KDA2015-09-29T18:49:05.0000<p>You men never learn.<br />
Do you really think that leaders will ignore the Bible and yet be obsessively observant of mere constitutional documents? &mdash;That they will despise the word of God and yet scrupulously follow the laws they invented amongst themselves?<br />
The rulers of the Earth disobey the second psalm&rsquo;s very direct requirement to explicitly acknowledge Christ; do you think their blood-thirsty thievery will be checked by the second article of whatever constitution? They despise word of God, which is unchanging and perfect, so why would they respect your amendment-after-amendment document?
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<p>It&rsquo;s a remarkable stupidity, this age of secularism. It&rsquo;s crazy that we set aside the Bible, which has two books called &ldquo;Kings&rdquo; and is full of royal histories <em>with attendant moral instruction</em>, and yet insist that our presidents treat as scripture these pathetic constitutions over which they <em>preside</em>. In spite of the attempts of centuries and generations, they have consistently turned out one thief and tyrant after another, yet they rinse and repeat as though this time a piece of paper designed by evil men shall once-for-all fix the evil hearts of men. They never even stop to think that their document <em>cannot</em> possibly have any moral weight precisely because it is not of God, who alone can ground morality and offer potent punitive threats to a sovereign. But the secularists have been cursed with such blindness and madness because they do not set God before them.
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<p>Yet, for instance, just the 62<sup>nd</sup> psalm alone has all that we ever need to know about good governance, and more besides. If a king or president holds to be true just this one psalm, he is going to govern better than any properly-constitutional American president ever could have. First, it refutes the democrats&mdash;for they are not any guarantor of good governance, but are instead just a bunch of envious schemers&mdash;for they institutionalise the evil of constantly attacking those whom God has given authority, and they cloak their evil ambition in the fake righteousness of seeking good governance; they speak a fake &ldquo;His Excellency the President&rdquo; when in their hearts they think themselves better-suited to execute that office.<blockquote>How long will all of you attack a man to batter him, like a leaning wall, a tottering fence? They only plan to thrust him down from his high position. They take pleasure in falsehood. They bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse.</blockquote>But David counsels the king &ldquo;For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.&rdquo; The One Who alone institutes the authority of the king, and Who, because of His own will, preserves him against all comers, Him alone should the king regard concerning authority. The impotent frothings and giddy rage of a billion malcontents should be punished when it is not ignored; it is rebellion when it is not mere nuisance. And if a king regards God, he has a better cause to righteous exercise of his <em>job</em> and <em>calling</em> than any other that can be profferred. Rather than agitating for a sacralist state, the question is how any other state&mdash;a state of madness and stupidity&mdash;ever obtained at all in the first place. &ldquo;He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken,&rdquo; says the Christian king, who alone rightly acknowledges the source of his authority, &ldquo;On God rests my salvation and my glory; my mighty rock, my refuge is God.&rdquo;
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<p>Now, the psalm gets more-interesting. For in the modern day, there has been a determined effort to pretend that stations of life and estates are not a reality. Yet:<blockquote>Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath.</blockquote>Here the king acknowledges those of low estate, who are just as much a reality as those of high estate; but he also acknowledges that all these are vanity. If a king sets before him this, he (like even the most-democratic of pretenders) knows that those of low estate are a breath, but he is further instructed that those of high estate are even worse: a delusion; for before God they all get tipped up in the scales, but the ones of high estate are worse off because they never lived like the vessels of contempt that they are, but instead spent all their lives thinking of themselves as more in any way than those of low estate&mdash;quite a delusion.<br />
And now to the king as much as to the subject:<blockquote>Put no trust in extortion; set no vain hopes on robbery; if riches increase, set not your heart on them.</blockquote>Without the millions of words that the Austrian School of economics would have poured forth about &ldquo;honest money&rdquo; (or &ldquo;sound money&rdquo; if you do not want to be honest), you have in one sentence the king being told not to resort to taking by force to uphold his realms or projects, even to fund a war of survival. If he had no money, such a king would turn to God: &ldquo;Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.&rdquo; But the danger for a king is not so much when he is pressed for cash as when he has lots of it; and here he is told to watch out for how riches will ensnare his heart.
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<p>But now, the final death-knell for the prevailing secularism&mdash;why secularism is wrong and why the covenanted monarchy alone has the grounds for good governance:<blockquote>Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love. For you will render to a man according to his work.</blockquote>The principal claim and accursed confession of the secularist Constitution&mdash;that power belongs to the people&mdash;is here refuted three-fold. Power belongs to God, you evil nation! For His is the kingdom, the power, and the glory; now and forever; amen. And because he will render to a man&mdash;king and pauper alike&mdash;according to his work, He is indeed the One to Whom all power belongs. Amen.
</p>Demba Camara’s Exhumation FolkloriqueahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICJ948KDA2015-09-29T15:06:09.0000<p>Things like this are why the Manden just can’t sustain comparison.
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<p>That is Demba Camara’s 1970 track, <i>Exhumation Folklorique</i>. Extremely classical; the one I have even bears the artifacts of having been ripped off an aged vinyl. And still, it wins. Demba is stuck with a few minutes and a few back-up singers. And still, it wins.
I mean, by our standards, all the signs of “not even trying” are there. And yet? Excellence.
</p>Reformation Study Bible ReviewahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICL7JsKDA2015-09-28T16:29:18.0000<p>Long ago, I pre-ordered the Reformation Study Bible that was edited by R C Sproul (of Ligonier Ministries), and I was excited about it even before I got to see it. I have had it for over two months, now, and I am very happy to have a good paper Bible with study notes, but I also have some gripes to note. I have always wanted to write a review of it since then. I want to cover several things about the Bible itself, but first I will discuss the version.
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<p>The version is English Standard Version (ESV), which, unfortunately, is now the norm among anglophone Reformed; I say &ldquo;unfortunately&rdquo; because, while it is a very good translation, the publishers of it are so jealously defensive of it that they are the only ones I know who have successfully issued take-down orders for <em>unformatted XML</em> copies of it that <del>are</del> <ins>were</ins> found on Google Drive. Nobody ever created any of the prevailing versions with the expectation of making money from electronic versions&mdash;electronic versions are so cheap and unprofitable, on top of post-dating all these versions&mdash;so for as long as people buy paper Bibles (which they do) the profit obligations of the publisher, such as they are, have been fulfilled. But the publishers of the ESV have, for many decades already, made money off paper versions, and yet they are still jealous over <a href="https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B46tVNkMxgONfmgtMEhZMGo0Z2oySVNNU3AzZ2xqQ1dZSEkzZFVNOXp3MUNHYzV5VV9EVnc&amp;usp=drive_web&amp;tid=0B46tVNkMxgONfk91c1JzVUlRSjZJeHFwWVF0Z1h0SGtRUmhsSnduSURqSnAtWHQ5cUZpSTQ">Zefania XML versions</a> of it! May they be accursed of God.
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<p>The packaging and presentation is good&mdash;I like the spartan design of the cover, with the subtle Ligonier logo&mdash;but it doesn&rsquo;t present itself as &ldquo;heirloom&rdquo; material. All the materials are of box and paper; that is fine for a study Bible, but in this day of Bible Gateway and Bible Hub and OliveTree and Sword and Zefania XML, honestly, the extra ten-twenty dollars or so that it would take to calf-skin a Bible is worth it. Nobody buys a paper (study) Bible because he needs a Bible; they buy it for collections and so on. This was not the case for me, but one thing that should result from the <em>irrelevance</em> of paper Bibles to the normal reader of the Word is that the industry (yes: those who are making money off it) should understand that every buyer is buying premium. There are enough cheap Bibles out there; there is enough Gideon&rsquo;s and random other Chinese publishers turning out unlicenced ESVs. If I buy a legit ESV with a sound name against it, it should &#133; my point is that, if you are selling it in print (in a box), you are back to the days of the illuminated manuscript. Each copy is a keep-sake, and that for centuries.
</p>
<p>This point above&mdash;that a paper Bible sold today must be premium&mdash;is going to be a simmering subtext to whatever criticism follows. You may not agree; even so, I can find a free ESV, even in hardback, after some ten minutes of looking. If I do not get it essentially free, it should be because it is of <em>premium</em> quality.
</p>
<p>A quick example of this issue: there is no ribbon. Really? In a <em>study</em> Bible? A study Bible should have at least two ribbons to hold place; if I want to go off to the islands&mdash;with no electricity, just me and my Bible&mdash;I should not have to remember to take a placeholder. In this case, I would have to remember to take four, because a study Bible can easily have a student of the Word tracking so many places at once. And yet they could have sensibly justified this by saying that this is not an premium Bible&mdash;and that is exactly the problem. There was a time when a cheap Testament came with a ribbon, and it was expected; today, a pre-ordered study Bible has none!
</p>
<p>But apart from using a greedy publisher&rsquo;s version and not being presented in a &ldquo;premium&rdquo; package, there is little that is objectionable about the presentation of text itself. As far as copy-setting the text, the execution was quite impressive. Study Bibles are exceptionally challenging in layout, but when you look at this one, you feel that there was a real investment of time.
</p>
<p>The guys who designed the Bible are named, as is sensible, but the typeface is not named. Come on. This is what I mean, you see, because if they had been making their Bible for posterity, they would not miss out such a crucial detail. Today you find people naming typefaces after designers (&ldquo;Caslon&rdquo;) and even individual works in which exemplars of a certain style or type appeared long ago.<br />
They typeface itself is beautiful, actually, and has a sufficient supply of nice ligatures. The ligatures are not very traditional, which is delightful; but ultimately the typeface does not distinguish itself either by its looks or by name. It is the normal and forgettable face that, say, a beautified Merriweather could replace. I think the &ldquo;standard-issue typeface&rdquo; has had its time&mdash;if I were typesetting a Bible today, I would be obsessed with a chance to use something as wild and novel as, say, Alegreya.
</p>
<p>But regarding the type-setting, there is one thing in which these guys excelled: shadowing control. The paper is the thin India paper we have all come to expect in thick publications, but there is almost absolutely no perceived shadowing, because they managed to lay out the text well-enough to offset any ghosting. It is quite satisfying to see the lines fall over each other in such perfect sync, even on a single leaf, and this is going to make it at least a very comfortable Bible to use in normal circumstances.
</p>
<p>The Bible has good resources, which are the many renowned Reformed scholars who contribute to the volume, and the confessions it appends to the end. I have not had the chance to explore enough of these contributions to present a worthwhile review of them, but I expect that nothing flagrantly heterodox could have slipped in past such an editorial pedigree.<br />
Yet the canonical resources are quite an&aelig;mic when compared to how much space is allocated to the scholars. Of the Three Forms of Unity, only the Belgic Confession is included. Since it is anglophone, the Westminster Confession of Faith is also sensibly included. But, unfortunately, so is the London Baptist Confession! This is a serious error on their part, because the Baptist confession is not even orthodox! (Accursed be any man who trivialises the multi-generational-ness of the covenants of God! The Baptists formalise rebellion against parents, and call it good and sound doctrine&mdash;for, according to them, a child may legitimately <em>not</em> receive and follow the orthodox religion of his father, which is a damnable error and accursed heresy.) Sound Reformed doctrine has as little to do with the Baptists as it does with the Episcopalians; and the 39 Articles are missing for good reason.
</p>
<p>Moreover, the Westminster Confession has, from the beginning, had the relevant Bible references included (the English Parliament actually required them of the Assembly of Divines), and yet they are not only missing in the text of the confession itself (!), but you also do not find back-references (<i>i.e.</i>, from the text of the Bible to an article of the confession). In a Bible that wraps the text of scripture on either side with the many words of scholars&mdash;and in an age when computers are used in such work, and the algorithm to achieve this is simple&mdash;how can we explain this lacuna? Since the <i>Statenvertaling</i>, confessions have been a normal feature in the back of the Bible; but now, centuries later, there is no real improvement on this laudable tradition.
</p>
<p>Moreover, this is a bit of a regression since the translation of the Synod of Dort; the <i>Statenvertaling</i> had more than just the confession; it also had the Heidelberg Catechism. There isn&rsquo;t a catechism in this Study Bible. Imagine: they put the redundant Baptist confession, which basically just rehashes Westminster for the most part, and yet they left out <em>any</em> catechisms. This lacuna is hard to explain, except that the guiding consideration was neither the orthodoxy of resources (worrying) nor exhaustive supply of orthodox resources (regrettable); by including the Baptist standard&mdash;and, tellingly, the Baptists do not have more than just a cribbed confession; they have neither catechism nor subscription to the Canons of Dort&mdash;one is led to believe that profit (<i>i.e.</i>, being able to sell to the sizeable population of pious American Baptists) was a bigger influence on the choice of resources. &mdash;And, no, the Canons of Dort are not there, either; this is not a problem, in itself, but is something I would like to note.
</p>
<p>I think the relationship that readers have with the Bible has evolved enough to justify a lot more effort being put in every last new production of it, especially if it will be sold. I also think that the Reformed tradition is old enough, now, that resource Bibles done in this tradition have many important precedents to respect and many <em>canonical</em> resources to include, that the study Bible cannot be approached with old eyes any more. Liturgical forms, for instance, have their place in a study Bible, because, like all things Reformed, they are thoroughly biblical, and yet, because Reformed worship is so sparse, almost everything required for Sunday can be packed away in a large, well-done volume. Perhaps I would even have insisted on appending a metric psalter, but I accept dissent on this one.<br />
Some time, I will be designing and producing a study Bible; it will not be easy to make it better than this one in any way, but that would have to be the requirement and aim.
</p>Arming for the Fight: TruthahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICJk5YKDA2015-09-25T15:39:08.0000<p>Those who believe that victory in war comes from men (rather than from God) will necessarily obsess about men; but the right thing is to know that victory comes from God&mdash;&ldquo;who gives victory to kings, who rescues David his servant from the cruel sword&rdquo;&mdash;and to obsess about God. For the king is not saved by his vast hordes, nor the warrior by his great strength; it is God who keeps alive those who trust in His unfailing love.
</p>
<p>So, for instance, those who think victory comes from the preparations and machinations of men will see a lot of depth is Sun Tzu&rsquo;s &ldquo;War is deceit,&rdquo; and his &ldquo;Keep your plans as dark the night.&rdquo; For such people, a spy or a leaker or a whistle-blower is a problem to overcome; as though it is impossible that God could just decree that, in spite of their best efforts, the spy or leaker or whistle-blower find out what they are planning, or that their well-concealed designs come to naught anyway.<br />
Moreover, in computer security, we know that relying on &ldquo;security by obscurity&rdquo; is a foolish strategy; rather, it should be security in structure. In software, this means good cryptography; in war, this means getting victory by the will of God: that the enemy simply has no working response to our strategy and tactics, even if you placed it all clearly before him.
</p>
<p>Moreover, it is the Republic of Uganda that we are fighting; they trust in large armies and strong warriors. Their best-laid plans will fail, their strategists will be deluded and their tacticians blinded. They will find out, when it is too late, that they have no plan to answer to our designs; that they have no strategy to survive our revolution; that they have to tactic to survive our assaults. The soldiers will notice this before their leaders do, and those who are not too scared to fight any more will be fighting their own leaders. They will end up consuming themselves, with every man&rsquo;s sword against his brother.
</p>
<p>Our winning strategy does not depend on being secret, but on being a true &ldquo;check-mate&rdquo;. That the enemy may even see it coming, but without an effective response; that the enemy sees clearly, even in advance, that he has been out-smarted and out-man&oelig;uvred, without any refuge from the revolution.<br />
And, indeed, for this reason I will state out clearly three things concerning our fight:
</p>
<ol>
<li>
We do not break promises and covenants, even those made to/with our enemies.
</li>
<li>
We do not give our enemies false information, if we give them any information at all.
</li>
<li>
We do not conceal our identities whether by masks or by false names.
</li>
</ol>
<p>These three things, though not the only ones of this kind in our war doctrine, are related to each other and pertinent here. They are all about being truthful, and they are not going to be found among our enemies. They distinguish us, on top of bearing witness to the fact that we <em>need not</em> be deceitful to win. Many people will not agree with such a standard, and will not associate themselves with the warring side that puts so high a premium on being truthful <em>even with enemies</em>, even to the point of endangering the whole war effort; I mean, we don&rsquo;t even conceal the identities of the revolutionaries!
</p>
<p>Well, &ldquo;this is like the days of Gideon to Me,&rdquo; says the Lord. For as Gideon was required to whittle down his numbers by several tests, so also our numbers are whittled down&mdash;even to just one, if necessary&mdash;with the tests being, not of the body as in the days of Gideon, but of the heart: that we have among us only those who <em>truly</em> believe that our victory is inevitable, and that the real test for us is not before men, but before God, Who has already decreed our victory. We are required to win in truth; if we fight in deceitfulness, like our enemies do, it would be such a catastrophe if we won, that God will not actually permit that to happen. (Yes: we are truthful because God is using us to establish the Christian state by truthfulness, rather than that we should be truthful lest we fail to establish the Christian state by truthfulness. The details are in the Canons of Dort, but in short: it is neither possible that the Christian state could fail to be established, or that it could be established by deceit; the deceitful will not establish it, and yet it will be established. This is just the will of God.)
</p>
<p>These three items above are just three of the conditions applied on all our revolutionaries, and one effect of the response to them is that they will serve to whittle the numbers in our ranks down. Another important effect of them is that should our revolutionaries get questioned, it can be safely assumed that, as a matter of fixed policy, we never require them to lie to their interrogators. They may conceal information for whatever reason; but if they reveal any information, it is truthful. &mdash;And, because lying to interrogators is a common way to survive or shorten torture, and yet that way is not permitted to us, we do not expect that any information know to our revolutionaries will be long concealed from wicked interrogators; and so be it.
</p>
<p>Moreover, <a href="/blog/ahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICJhYcKDA">the notices that the revolution distributes</a> are in the same spirit: we do not attack the armed operatives of the state without warning them by these notices, and also every mosque we are to take down will receive fore-warning by means of these notices.<br />
All our enemies will get an opportunity to see us as mere messengers, when we bear them notice and warning; and when their hearts are hardenened so that they disregard the notices, that they may be destroyed, the next time they see us will be as warriors of the faith: revolutionaries of state, punishers of crime.<br />
(And this is also why we may not cover our faces; because only criminals do that. But we are not committing crime; rather, we are punishing crime and those who abet it&mdash;and everything we have done, we have done in the open, that it may be known that we act in righteousness.)
</p>
<p>Our promises and covenants are made before both God and man; so they are always solemn and, by policy, we do not break them.<br />
Our revolutionaries can be known to our enemies by name and face, and with certainty; so they survive our enemies not because they are in hiding or living double-lives, but because they are truly safe.<br />
Our revolutionaries are not required to lie to our enemies; so they may conceal information, but if they do not, they only reveal truth.
</p>Abapoto Bakomyewo: The Notices of the RevolutionahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICJhYcKDA2015-09-25T11:15:44.0000<p>On top of the <a href="/blog/ahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICLiIoKDA">Declaration of War</a>, there is the set of notices that we will be distributing in every area of operations.<br />
They are, for the most part, self-explanatory if you already know what “the sacralist revolution” is. The ones here are the default form, with the whole country as the area of operations. They are the basic form, and they are valid—for the whole country is, indeed, the area of operations. In practice, though, the areas will be smaller and more-restricted.
</p>
<p>The first one is the <a href="/files/AMIfv95XApD-RD9V4WgVwRrRk6A1Gw6wo72JQzgxbJJul1VpYXt2XVUMxBraNWpcgVoQOAYpermouMqEvS5YQv8BjPWnQTlmbiuzdEoOfkd5XM1A87koY4N95LO2sg8VZtSycOFbHg2iFJt0Qvs_tRWxe4kzMPnCE8_8xHcl8_liaYWqh_ESNKU">notice to the armed operatives of the state</a>. The operatives, in this case, are the police officers, because those ones belong to the state, while the soldiers of the military belong to the nation. The police enforce the secularist Constitution of the state; the army defends the nation. Nevertheless, the same notice can be applied without modification to the military, should it take part in contending against the sacralist revolution.
</p>
<p>In this notice, also, is a reference to the legitimacy of the sword that the operatives bear, in spite of their bearing it for an authority that, now, is illegitimate and which, because it perpetuates secularism, is charged with abetting crime. But they are required to lay down their sword, and disband their hierarchy. If they do not, they are enemy combatants.
</p>
<p>The second notice is <a href="/files/AMIfv97nneIe2VWsp2ArPRy0mU6nRGA2kX2ehtWGKb3xwqrGMq1Y9keVxcfJZ-wsyjJJA6_fh3eW_VQycPs7i9Ff_Fci27mJ3gn5s25vTSYzDLrp5McIssOa36X9K-3cSE8Ny9AfAzm6dFvtHYBPM3uisXLqPIb9moi9LfZQju1IvJOtSsTNaGQ">the notice to the secularists and heretics</a>; in particular, the heretics being addressed are the islamists, who dare to maintain before me that the Bible be subjected to the lies and ignorance of their alkoran. It requires that the secularists and islamists abandon their false ideas, or vacate the area of operations. If they do not, they are enemy combatants.
</p>
<p>One of the requirements for this revolution is that every last islamic artefact is to be purged from the land. I, personally, will not shun or avoid the acrimony of the muslims all over the World, because I, personally, will glory in taking down their high places. Their minarets I will flatten; their mosques I will devote to destruction. Their pulpits of wickedness I will desecrate; their accursed poem-book of heresy I will make bonfires with. Their lands I will seize; their very clothes I will burn. Their fighters I will give no quarter; their families I will banish. I will put my name, personally, against the purge of the muslims from everywhere that I have authority; the pious among my progeny will continue to pursue this policy faithfully. “Morning by morning, I will cut off the wicked from the city of the Lord.” Let me be known to all the muslims everywhere as their implacable enemy; for I will not tolerate any who say that my scriptures, which are the truthful word of God, are to be treated as lies.
</p>Abapoto Bakomyewo: Announcing the Declaration of WarahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICLiIoKDA2015-09-25T08:47:35.0000<p>In our World, today, the secular democratic republic is the respectable default configuration of the nation-state. A pity, then, that it is also wrong, deceitful, and outright damnable. They declare secularism in order to avoid having to agree on ultimate truth or otherwise fight as ultimate enemies; but in due time, this happens anyway, when one does not accept secularism as ultimate truth. They declare democracy, because they want to prevent resort to force; but in due time, this happens anyway, when one does not accept that the democracy is justifiable. They declare a republic in order to sate the envy of those who do not have sovereign office; but apart from being required to be dishonest about intentions regarding succession and political egalitarianism, monarchy by any other name is still monarchy.
</p>
<p>Now, I have made a few attempts to get the Government of the Republic of Uganda to answer to my requirement that we step back from secularism, in particular, but since they do not take me seriously until they are threatened, it has come to that point where they <em>have to</em> be threatened, since they <em>have to</em> take me seriously. Perhaps the most-important reason why they have to take me seriously is this: I am serious. Every flood begins with a drop, and in this case the drop is this <a href="/files/AMIfv95XVRLCtYq60W7xShSvQqIZGe_QBk8-RWEaxALX6jIG0El6OUqbU6pJT6iWOqIPfIAebYwkH9IfVskEhaEvMPhAro5SIQj9vKg-_erH3bAdL4lECpnfOGxWfwRcZnqz8L8rWw-QsALgJvQntnMGWT0Fiu8JOlZ06rdJ9H9uqs2V1gGEgTE">Declaration of War</a>. It is a lot more terse than my previous attempts, because I am done talking; in the past, it would have been pages upon pages. Nevertheless, this having been delivered&mdash;regardless of the reaction to it thus far&mdash;the war it declares and speaks of is solemnly on. You have been told. Now the fact is that you (whoever you may be) have just been thrust into a different mindset, and you do not know head or tail of it. Hence this post.
</p>
<p>Secularism is incoherent, especially in the case of Uganda, because the nation is aware of God, but is required to ignore Him by law. The motto mentions Him prominently; the national anthem opens with a line calling on Him; the oath of office prays to Him. But in spite of all these things, we are required never to permit religious influence on the state.<br />
Of course, this is not supportable, because if one should claim that his religion teaches that God allows murder and rape&mdash;as is the case in islam&mdash;we should be able, as a nation, to say that this is not the God we mean in our national references. But this cannot be done in a secular state, and we are going to war to fix that.
</p>
<p>Because the Constitution (1995) of the Republic of Uganda has that damnable article 7, no part of it can be salvaged, but is all consigned to the latrine. It is the shortest, clearest, most-direct single article in the entire document:<blockquote>Uganda shall not adopt a State religion.</blockquote>Incidentally, the first Constitution of Uganda (1962) was not secularist; having been done by the British (who, to this day, are not secularist), it had articles like:<blockquote>A law of the Legislature of the Kingdom of Buganda shall not apply to any person who is not an African any provision of the law or custom applicable to members of any African tribe with respect to inheritance, marriage, divorce, religion or the personal obligations attaching to a member of an African tribe as such.</blockquote>Therein it announces and sensibly expects that sacralist laws may be passed by the Legislature, but shall be limited only to such people as are properly under the purview of that Legislature (by tribe). That no such laws were passed is a regrettable error; that such laws are now illegal is a <i>casus belli</i>.<br />
The very first election ever organised under that 1962 Constitution resulted in a victory for the two allied parties &ldquo;Uganda People&rsquo;s Congress&rdquo; and &ldquo;Kabaka Yekka&rdquo;. The very first congratulation message ever delivered for election victory in Uganda was from Bishop Leslie Brown, at the very first thanksgiving prayer ceremony ever given in Uganda for electoral victory, in which he profusely thanked God and asked the newly-elected Prime Minister, Milton Obote (an Anglican like him and the Kabaka) to use the provisions of the 1962 Constitution and make the Church of Uganda the national church. When Obote did nothing, Bishop Brown organised <em>another</em> thanksgiving ceremony, and once again delivered exactly one message, unambiguously and emphatically: that the Church of Uganda be made the national church. At this time, Obote was already leaning towards the socialism that he later openly professed, and he was more-interested in marxist-style atheism, so he ignored the bishop again&mdash;even though, at the time, the Constitution of Uganda was not secularist. Others may perpetuate this apostasy, but we will not; others may tolerate it, but I will reverse it. <em>So help me God.</em>
</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Uganda did not actually remain secular. When Idi Amin overthrew Obote, he declared Uganda an islamic state, in February 1972, and emphasised in that statement (published jointly with Qaddafi, then-President of Libya) that he wanted to establish a sharia-compliant Uganda. What was wrong, here, was not that he wanted the supremacy of what he believed to be right and true; rather, what was wrong in what Idi Amin did was that he was casting for islam, which is wrong, rather than Christianity, which is right. Amin-bashing is very popular, but people do not realise that he cannot be condemned justly without a reference to what the ultimate standard of right and wrong is. Unless we can say that the standard of God is such-and-such, anything goes. (Of course, if we disagree on the standard of God, only conflict is left&mdash;so be it&mdash;which is why the islamic state and the secular state are both <em>supposed</em> to be fought.) We cannot even condemn Amin&rsquo;s declaration of Uganda as islamic without first condemning the secularist constitution even more.<br />
And this is the problem, ultimately, for the secularist: that even when he condemns, he cannot say why. Many stupid secularists will rush to condemn me; but since all they have is their opinion, and I have the veto of God, they can be safely ignored.
</p>
<p>Obote was wrong to refuse Bishop Brown&rsquo;s requests; Amin was wrong in establishing the wrong sacralism; the Constitution (1995) is wrong in establishing secularism.<br />
No nation-state is actually secular, because every nation-state acknowledges that ultimate authority whose decree is final; what usually passes for secularism actually relies on an implicit god (such as a self-worshipping collective populace that actually believes that its majority opinion is the root and foundation of all law and sound morality).<br />
What sacralist laws allow, on the other hand, is merely clarity that the state is not relativist (&ldquo;anything goes&rdquo;) but rather has a specific set of doctrines on God that are recognised as true, and from which flow the laws, the moral standard, and, very importantly, the authority to rule.
</p>
<p>Some will protest, saying &ldquo;You should not force your religion on anyone!&rdquo; But we aren&rsquo;t, either; rather, we are requiring that, for instance, if the state were to take any moral position (against corruption, say, or homosexuality, or mutilations) that it should be clear and well-known who, as God, would be the foundation of these rulings on morality. Any law or system not founded on an appeal to God is not founded at all, because I can&mdash;and do&mdash;challenge it as a baseless fad that is worthless because it goes against the sound truth of God. So now they may say &ldquo;But perhaps you are convinced that your Bible is right; what of others who aren&rsquo;t?&rdquo; Would that they said that to the secularists! &mdash;For do you think that only secularists see their ideal as so good and so true that whoever does not agree should be required by law to shut up? Or, is it only parliamentary-democrats who are allowed to force their views and style on everybody else? On the contrary, I say clearly: if you disagree with me, when I say that the Bible is true, then you are wrong, and no different from anybody else who challenges the basic law of the land. The Bible can&mdash;and should&mdash;check and correct even the majority opinion. Under us, it will.
</p>
<p>Besides: Christianity is true, and provably-so, and everything opposite to it is false, and provably-so. If it is about having the <em>correct</em> state religion, you have to have Christianity&mdash;and this is provable.<br />
And, anyway, Uganda is a Christian <em>nation</em>, even if it may not be a Christian state. In-between the Uganda Martyrs, on the one hand, and the wars that established the Ugandan entity in history, on the other hand, there is no room for confusion. Obviously Uganda is not just from 1962&mdash;otherwise why would the Christians of 1884 be called <em>Uganda</em> Martyrs, and to what non-existent entity was the independence being accorded in 1962? It is absurd to think that Ugandan history begins in 1962; and yet when you check that history, you find that Uganda is a Christian nation. Whether many like it or hate it, this fact of the national identity is so true that it has been the main influnce on Uganda&rsquo;s historical evolution, from the first time &ldquo;Uganda&rdquo; shows up in recorded history, to even those political parties which were active at the founding of the Republic. This is part of our heritage, even in a way secularism will never be. This is our history. This is the distinction of our fathers from all the unwashed masses of nations that surround us. This is our pride: that we, generation after generation, will contend earnestly that Christ be sovereign over this land.
</p>
<p>The current Constitution has no mention of God at all. It quotes the national motto, the national anthem, and the oath of office&mdash;all of which predate it by many decades&mdash;and these happen to be the only times that the Greatest Subject is mentioned at all. It is literally a godless document.<br />
I will not pretend with you: the need to accomodate people among us who do not accept the truth is what must have driven us this far from God whose salvation of Uganda is written out unambiguously in the nation&rsquos; history, because it is not that we do not know how He has graciously called us out of the darkness, but rather that we are afraid of being at variance with those who prefer the darkness (or the lies of heretics); but it is policy for me that light does not tolerate darkness, but drives it out. If indeed we disagree on this one point, for sure let us fight, because I have no room for you (and, presumably, you have no room for me). How long shall you shift between two opinions? &mdash;But if Christ is Lord, bow to Him.
</p>
<p>Imagine that the very first sentence in the 1995 Constitution is<blockquote>All power belongs to the people who shall exercise their
sovereignty in accordance with this Constitution.</blockquote>I cannot fathom how <em>I</em> or anyone else could be required to live under this every day, and respect it rather than fight against it, when our every prayer ends with this direct address to God:<blockquote>For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, now and forever. Amen.</blockquote>Amen. Power does not belong to the people. It belongs to God. Wherefore I exercise no sovereignty according to a document that starts off by disavowing both the sovereignty of God over <em>all things</em> (going on to make absolutely no mention of Him) and leaves no room for the crown rights of King Jesus; rather, I say (as in Daniel 4), &ldquo;the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom He will.&rdquo; And if God yield the kingdom into my hand, I dare you to take it out. (And, no, I cannot be blamed for what befalls you then: you rebelled against the authority of God, and indeed one that had declared as much to you.)
</p>
<p>What happened between 1884 (when Uganda was, at the time, pagan and sacralist) and 1995 (when Uganda was Christian and secularist) is an important part of the national history. In that time, Uganda was at points Christian and sacralist. After all, while it was under the British, it was considered not just Christian, in keeping with the history which before had first got the Europeans interested in Uganda, but also <em>Anglican</em> in keeping with the laudable principle that it was a realm of the Protestant crown.<br />
That&rsquo;s the other thing: no sovereign authority successfully expresses legitimacy unless it explicitly references the One from Whom comes all authority. So I say:<blockquote>Cognizant of the weightiness of the matter under consideration;<br />and aware of the high offence that it would be to take the name of the Lord God in vain;<br />by the power vested in me by <em>God Almighty</em>, I hereby announce and enact that:<br />the secularist Constitution is abolished, and the secular Republic is illegitimate.</blockquote>Who shall stand against me? By whom shall I be corrected? Who can contend with my claim, rooted as it is in the decree of God Himself? If God be for me, who can be against me? And this, you see, is why the secular authority cannot survive.
</p>
<p>More wars have been fought in Uganda to defend the Christian nation from those who would overthrow it, whether into paganism or heresy; and, because it is once again an unfortunate necessity, we have to fight again. What cannot be denied is that such war is a well-established tradition in Uganda, and that the Protestants have ultimately triumphed each time. That it is the doctrine of all the Christian World can be proven by a cursory check; that it is the tradition of our forebears is admitted even by those who do not approve of it. More-importantly, even when Idi Amin subjected Uganda to islam (like Kalema before him), he was not wrong in what he did, but only in what he believed&mdash;for Uganda was created for the Son of God, and not for that unitarian heresy which, because it denies the Father and the Son, has no place in the country.
</p>
<p>In the history of Uganda, the Protestants (&ldquo;Abapoto&rdquo;) have twice got in league, unequally-yoked, with heretics of different kinds, when they sought to establish a state that was submissive to the Lord. In each of those cases, they sinned greatly. Never, never ever should it ever be heard that the children of light were lying with the <i>devadasi</i> of Baal-Peor; and if it is, may a Phinehas rise up and run through our camp, striking to the left and to the right. Now we shall arise, with arms borne in righteousness, and our victory shall be a final victory, establishing sound doctrine into perpetuity, by covenant and statute, over the blessed country of the Nation That God Loves.
</p>
<p>As a revolutionary, I am simply fighting to establish such state as I believe to be correct. If it had been marxism that I believed to be correct, I would fight to establish it; if it had been democracy or secularism or republicanism that I believed to be correct, I would fight to establish it. But I happen to believe in Christianity as perfectly-correct, so I fight to establish it.<br />
O Uganda, may God uphold thee.
</p>Saving Europe from the ImmigrantsahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMD-0IQKDA2015-09-24T15:59:56.0000<p>There is nothing wrong, with migrants pouring into Europe <i>per se</i>. Indeed, if they had been the Christians of the Middle East flooding Europe with the simple and pious, it would be a net gain for Europe. The problem with the refugees/immigrants/migrants is not their race or ethnicity, which doesn&rsquo;t matter; for Europe is indeed for the Europeans, but the Europeans are not necessarily caucasoid. But the problem is that the immigrants are muslims, and they are fleeing problems that are caused, at root, by islam itself. They have not left the problem behind, but they have carried it into Europe, to infect that land with the murderousness and criminality taught by the heretic muhammad; for he sanctions the rape even of married women, on top of teaching p&aelig;dophilia and genocide as the command of God.
</p>
<p>Europe is not like other places in the World, just like Israel-Judah was never like any other nation. As Psalm 147 says:<blockquote>Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! For he strengthens the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you. He makes peace in your borders; he fills you with the finest of the wheat. &#133; He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and rules to Israel. He has not dealt thus with any other nation; they do not know his rules.</blockquote>So it is for all Judeo-Christian nations. The rules of God are such that nations that purjure with Him and turn aside from His statutes He judges thus. The Europeans have always known this, and been able to predict it from the Bible, and been able to prove it from the events around them. For instance, for their anti-Semitism, the Black Death came upon them; and this is why the realms of Casimir III the Great (of the Kingdom of Poland), who gave refuge to the Jews, were not touched by the plague that ravaged the rest of anti-Semitic Europe.<br />
<img alt="Black Death" src="/files/AMIfv97UPddzpSD4o10W3qcdJkiStjDGk74gZOCEq1Vx1Iqg7TKQd0rrq2CjO3J5c8U16DxQ7-trhvDiDziqABC5NiXXhAT23mL3LZSc6JzWU7sxhY-6yjWLtLSUmgmapTsinryDtl9OkuYTXQEIWvpYFVWvgaFD_iHiknJhIxXHRMoJTdJBLa0" /><br />
Of course, nobody likes that explanation, because to the post-Christian European an appeal to cosmic reasons for a provably-germ-theoretic epidemic sounds stupid (and, being also post-Christian, he is also quite anti-Semitic, such that it is very uncomfortable to acknowledge such a thing as the work of the God of the Jews); to the Jew, on the other hand, it is hard to confess this because he is scared of saying out loud that he believes himself superior and that for his oppression God should wreak such vengeance upon the nations. So the stupid reason you find thrown about is: the Jews wash a lot in their rituals, which is why they survived the plague, and Jew-friendly Poland with them. Nonsense, of course: the plague has nothing to do with personal hygiene, and, yes, pestilence&mdash;like sword, captivity, and famine&mdash;is under the direct control of God&rsquo;s decree.<br />
At that time, a cheap and quick way to save Europe would have been to make them read <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?interface=print&amp;version=ESV&amp;search=Romans+11">Romans 11</a> out loud in the churches and the streets; but pre-Reformation Europe would not do this any more than post-Christian Europe could. Therefore they died like flies, just as they will be overthrown like a rotted stump.
</p>
<p>But Europe is not necessarily for the Christians, either, which is why it is being taken over by the muslims. See how the nations that once bragged about their ethnicity are being cut off in mid-step! They were told &ldquo;Let him who boasts boast in the Lord,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Righteousness exalts a nation,&rdquo; so that they could indeed claim to be superior to any other nation by dint of being a thoroughly scriptural nation&mdash;Christian, reformed, covenanted, and faithful&mdash;but they chose godlessness, and &ldquo;their foolish hearts were darkened&rdquo; and they praised inbreeding as the source of sound genetics. The proud &ldquo;Aryan&rdquo; Germans, who mass-murdered Semites&mdash;Jews&mdash;for their ostensible inferiority, see how they have failed even to breed another generation! &mdash;And now <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/10/us-europe-migrants-germany-economy-idUSKCN0RA1Z220150910">the German government has confessed</a> that the immigrants have the upside of providing workers to the economy:<blockquote>Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel &#133; who is Chancellor Angela Merkel's deputy, described the expected arrival of an estimated 800,000 asylum-seekers by the end of 2015 "the biggest national, European challenge" since German reunification in 1990. &#133; "If we manage to quickly train those that come to us and to get them into work, then we will solve one of our biggest problems for the economic future of our country: the skills shortage," Gabriel said. "But there are also risks," he added, pointing to the danger that refugees may not integrate properly into German daily life if they do not receive language training.</blockquote>Imagine it! That the Germans, the claimed super-race, cannot even so much as fuck another generation into existence! <i>Made in Germany</i> can only be sustained by not being made by germanics. Once, this was policy, when they enslaved Semites, German-speaking Jews, to make war materiel for them; now, their flaccid loins tremble continually as they deal with the need to have Arabic-speaking Semites fill the skills gap. You see, &ldquo;<a href="http://www.rt.com/news/244873-germany-economy-immigrant-workforce/">Germany needs 500,000 migrants a year until 2050 - study</a>&rdquo;:<blockquote>Within the next 15 years, half of all German workers will become pensioners, the Bertelsmann Institute warns in a study published Friday. Without immigrants, Germany’s labor pool is likely to shrink from current its 45 million to 29 million people (or 36 percent) by 2050.<br /><br />Even if the number of employed women would somehow equal to that of men and the retirement age is prolonged to 70 years, this would only give additional 4.4 million workers.</blockquote>This particular problem is not unique to Germany, of course, and in fact all of Europe is affected by it. They are never going to concede that their godlessness is why they are being cut off, as though it is even possible that a people can fail to replace themselves, unless God wills their overthrow; they will insist on all sorts of alternative explanations, because their iniquity has blinded them to the obvious. Men and nations are created by God alone, and their times are in His hands; this is why the Jews are still here, and the Germans are not.
</p>
<p>This is, of course, a Europe-wide catastrophe, because the apostasy from the biblical truths has been Europe-wide. <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/314864-refugees-europe-juncker-plan/">The EU President says</a>:<blockquote>"We should do everything to change our nation legislation to allow refugees to work from day one when they arrive," he said. Europe is an “aging continent in demographic decline,” he said adding that migration should be viewed as a resource rather than a problem.</blockquote>And he is also stupid; he says: &ldquo;We are fighting the Islamic State – why are we not ready to accept those fleeing the Islamic State?&rdquo; Because they are muslims, of course! Because they are like the Islamic State (which, of course, is truly islamic, and has only one good thing going for it: that it is extremist in its piousness).<br />
Indeed: why are you fighting Islamic State? If you legitimately fight Islamic State, it is because you fight the faithful remnant of muhammad (&ldquo;extremist muslims&rdquo;); if you fight Islamic State legitimately, it is because it is legitimate to fight islam. And if that be the case, why do you let muslims into Europe, importing the problem? Why do you import people who, like Islamic State, say that genocide by mass-beheadings is the decree of God?
</p>
<p>Then there is the horrible blindness of the leaders of the Roman Catholic church, which many times in the past caused Europe to err into war, famine, and pestilence. The pope sounds like a Hindu <i>sadhu</i>, and would probably pass out if he had to recommend, in sync with the Bible, that the Middle East christianise in order to have peace, and, in sync with his predecessors, that the Middle Easterners convert from the lie of Mahound Qathem in order to get a refuge from the result of Qathem&rsquo;s lies. Instead, <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/314574-pope-host-refugee-family/">he has decreed</a> an efficient invasion and undermining of what remains of Roman Catholic Europe! Job said &ldquo;When a land falls into the hands of the wicked, he blindfolds its judges. If it is not he, then who is it?&rdquo; God says of the rebellious romanist papists, in Zechariah 11:<blockquote>I am raising up in the land a shepherd who does not care for those being destroyed, or seek the young or heal the maimed or nourish the healthy, but devours the flesh of the fat ones, tearing off even their hoofs. Woe to my worthless shepherd, who deserts the flock! May the sword strike his arm and his right eye! Let his arm be wholly withered, his right eye utterly blinded!</blockquote>Even Christ had already promised, in Revelation 2, that those historically-Roman Catholic nations and communions that persist in mariolatry and the other damnable errors and doctrines of the papists would be punished <em>as evidence to all the churches</em>:<blockquote>But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works.</blockquote>Note that the Reformation called out the romanist mass as idolatry&mdash;we have evidence of the church having identified such a sin&mdash;and that it is classical adultery to pray by the host of heaven so that Christ, the only intercessor given to the church, is consequently one-of-many routes to God. If Christ did not expect that the fortunes of the churches are evidence before our eyes, He would never have said these things, nor yet threshed the romanist nations before our eyes like this. Moreover, He states that He has given them time to repent unto sound doctrine, and they have so far refused&mdash;and only the romanists fit this bill, for reformation is repentance. They rebelled against the grace of God, and now they receive as their works deserve! Moreover, Christ adds:<blockquote>But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call the deep things of Satan, to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden. Only hold fast what you have until I come.</blockquote>This here is proof that this is a church that is split on this issue, because not everybody in there has accepted the doctrines that are bringing punishment; and moreover, that those who have not been romanised are required to be <em>conservative</em>, adding nothing and losing nothing, until the end. Necessarily, this is a church with an authority that is taught as unchanging and fixed in the truth of the word of God&mdash;Reformed, in other words&mdash;rather than counter-Reformation stupidities like &ldquo;papal infallibility&rdquo;, &ldquo;immaculate conception&rdquo;, or Newmanian &ldquo;doctrinal development&rdquo; which are all most-heretical doctrines&mdash;indeed, post-Reformation doctrines, too, which are therefore waving flags of obstinate unrepentance and stiff-necked blasphemy.
</p>
<p>This is exactly 70 years since the Jews were fleeing from place to place; it is also the biggest single refugee crisis that time of World War 2. Of course, World War 3 is upon us; it is just not being fought (as yet) in the elephantine way of World War 2. At any rate, the elephantine style of war will show up soon enough, as <a href="http://www.rt.com/politics/316291-kremlin-promises-counter-steps-in/">the steps are being taken</a>&mdash;not as threats, but as exposed plans.<br />
Too many people&mdash;even those who, being Reformed, should take it seriously that God is in charge of every event, as their confessions and canons teach quite unambiguously&mdash;dismiss the signs that God places before them. For He said in His word that the heavenly bodies are for seasons and signs, but they ignore the &ldquo;blood moons&rdquo; &ldquo;lunar tetrad&rdquo; fad, which is exciting indeed <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/316005-supermoon-lunar-eclipse-coincide/">while it tarries</a>, and the even-more-exciting &ldquo;Shemitah&rdquo; fad, which God has instituted and fanned that people may wake up and see what&rsquo;s coming. In line with this time, as a sign of the times, the highest shrine of the anti-Christ has had just over one hundred die when a crane collapsed and then again, in the same period, just over seven hundred have died on their highest holiday because of a stampede.<br />
This is not a normal time. There is a cup in the hand of the Lord, foaming and well-mixed, and He will pour it out and make the nations drink it to the dregs, and they will totter and stagger. And none shall survive, save those that flee to Him as refuge.
</p>
<p>This is the fate of even those nations that are not European, but have not taken refuge in God. Japan, for instance. They pursued secular excellencies, and copied technology-worship, and prostituted their national resources for the evil work of joining in league with the Germans. In those days, the emperors who had rejected sound Christianity, of which they had much evidence in the both before and during the Edo period, and who opted instead for emperor worship, were humbled as the Germans had been. And now they are resurrecting militancy and emperor-worship, even as their population has been cut off from Earth as has happened to the Germans. The Japanese are in fact <a href="https://news.vice.com/video/the-worst-internship-ever-japans-labor-pains">dealing in slaves</a>, now, as <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/06/us-europe-migrants-france-farright-idUSKCN0R60TF20150906">the Germans allegedly are</a>.
</p>
<p>Moreover, these things were prophesied before, and therefore we must of necessity watch this spectacle, because it was promised by God. Romans 11 had said to the Christian nations, like the Romans, that if they did not persist in faith, would be cut off like branches being pruned off an olive tree. Isaiah 18 also promises that before the harvest, the spreading branches&mdash;the mighty, and even imperialistic, Christian nations&mdash;would be cut off and left for the wild birds&mdash;the invading Arabs&mdash;to feast on them. (For, of course, carrion-eaters do not eat pruned branches; rather, this is prophecy that God would carry out Paul&rsquo;s warning before the Last Day.)
</p>
<p>Europe can be saved from this harrowing invasion by returning to the simple piety of the forefathers of the Europeans. Now, either the Europeans are not Christians and therefore do not believe in the Bible, and therefore will die as the Bible says they should, or they are Christians and they believe in the Bible (or can be thus reformed), such that Psalm 9 does not just bear witness but also teaches:<blockquote>The wicked shall return to Sheol, all the nations that forget God. &#133; Arise, O LORD! Let not man prevail; let the nations be judged before you! Put them in fear, O LORD! Let the nations know that they are but men!</blockquote>Indeed, they are returning to sheol before our very eyes, all the nations that <em>forget</em> God. The only thing that can spare Europe this sad fate&mdash;not invasion by immigrants, which is not necessarily bad, but rather invasion by muslims, which is incalculably sad&mdash;is an insistence on what exactly makes Europe different, good, and even great: the Lord their God. Then they should turn to Him, and He will turn to them, when they seek Him with all their hearts. Europe, to save itself, should declare for Christ, and &ldquo;search the scriptures daily,&rdquo; like the Bereans, to establish among them sound doctrine.
</p>
<p>Anyway, whatever. They can be secularist if they want; but as for me and my house, we will serve Christ.
</p>One Verse and the Prelacy: On the Difference Between Protestant and ReformedahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgID14ocKDA2015-09-22T10:39:12.0000<p>There is one verse that basically settles the issue of the prelacy for Christians&mdash;that is, for all for whom the Bible is authoritative in any sense whatsoever:<blockquote>So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed.</blockquote>That&rsquo;s 1 Peter 5:1.
</p>
<p>The Protestants, during their Reformation, were like Jehu, who said to one of the pious Rechabites, &ldquo;Come with me, and see my zeal for the Lord!&rdquo; and yet of whom it is also written &ldquo;Thus Jehu wiped out Baal from Israel. But Jehu did not turn aside from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin&mdash;that is, the golden calves that were in Bethel and in Dan.&rdquo; Jehu did not overthrow the cult symbols which had come to symbolise the distinction between North Israel and Judah in the south. Like the Protestants, Jehu repeatedly referred to the expressed word of the Lord that he had heard from the mouths of prophets like Elijah:<blockquote>Jehu said to Bidkar his aide, &ldquo;Take him up and throw him on the plot of ground belonging to Naboth the Jezreelite. For remember, when you and I rode side by side behind Ahab his father, how the Lord made this pronouncement against him &#133;&rdquo;</blockquote>Moreover:<blockquote>And the Lord said to Jehu, &ldquo;Because you have done well in carrying out what is right in my eyes, and have <em>done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in my heart</em>, your sons of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.&rdquo;</blockquote>And yet of him it is also written &ldquo;But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God of Israel, with all his heart. He did not turn from the sins of Jeroboam, which he made Israel to sin.&rdquo; The problem was not in implementing those things that he had heard with his own ears from the prophets, but in implementing those things which were already written down earlier by the prophet Moses. Moreover, Moses had required that this law not depart from before a king who has been raised up by God over His people; if Jehu had done so, he would have reversed the error of Jeroboam.
</p>
<p>Now, many people would say &ldquo;Oh, come on. He did enough! Does God require <em>perfection</em> only?&rdquo; Yes. It is a grave error to think of God as one of us. He is not like us, given to accepting imperfection; otherwise it would not have taken Christ on the cross, and half-measures would be acceptable. But only such as are perfect may draw near; and this is why outside of Christ there is simply no hope or even the vaguest chance. &ldquo;You, O Lord, are of purer eyes than to look upon evil,&rdquo; to quote Habakkuk. He charged the ancient Israelites repeatedly with this sin, of thinking that He is like them, and tolerant of syncretism and half-assed efforts. And so, as He commended Jehu for obeying His word with regard to Ahab, and destroying the cult of Baal, so He began to diminish Israel&rsquo;s territorial holdings as punishment, and charged Jehu with sin in not being careful to walk in His law with all his heart. This is the charge he lays on the Protestants.
</p>
<p>In the past, the English attained to tortuous reformation, which involved Henry VIII, who had earlier been commended by the pope at the time (and awarded a title, <i>fidei defensor</i>, which the British kings still use today) for his attacks on sound Protestant doctrine. In those days, the papist romanists who held positions in the land either kept quiet or celebrated the counter-Reformation that their murderous king was heading. Then the king murdered another of his wives, and even the pope could not play along any more; so the king called up the prelates, and they laid out the 39 articles of the Church of England. These, since they are reformed in doctrine and are a repentance from the multitude of romanist and papist errors, are the breaking down of the cult of Baal, but the sin that the prelacy&mdash;the pope and all his hierarchy, down to the last bishop&mdash;had made the church to sin was not reversed; for that sin is the prelacy itself.
</p>
<p>Of course the wicked prelates, who had quivered under their covers while the king murdered his wives, and were complicit in his opposition to Reformation, could not now be relied on to pursue such reformation as would indeed have them overthrown. They looked out first for themselves, rather than for the things of God; and this, the sin of Jehu, was central to the counter-Reformation response among the popes themselves, who the English prelates denounced. But the worst thing about them is that they take it upon themselves to represent and speak for the church as a whole, yet they are absolutely wicked from the heart out. If the church had no heresy of prelacy cast upon it, every man would have to walk before God by faith (for He sees the heart&mdash;1 Samuel 16), rather than before men (leading from this heresy to the auricular confession, which is a romanist lie). In the case where men walk by faith before God, they would need&mdash;like Jehu&mdash;to refer to the word of God, and then charge the king with wrong (as did John the Baptist) and also charge the prelacy with wrong (as did the Reformed presbyterians/&ldquo;puritans&rdquo;).
</p>
<p>&ldquo;The stone that the builder refused has become the head cornerstone.&rdquo; All other points of the Reformation are about us and our comfort in the finished and perfect work of Christ; for even when we insist on the &ldquo;scripture alone&rdquo;, we do so because we <em>know</em> that all else will mislead us and be to our hurt. But contending for the presbyterial government of the church is all about the Lordship of Christ over His betrothed. Many a man will fight that their interests be safe, but the test of loyalty to Jesus Christ as Lord over all things will come, first, for the prelate when he has to confess that his very position is in error, and then, second, for the Protestant&mdash;Anglican or otherwise&mdash;who has to contend for an issue that is merely in the interest of Christ (the church, after all, is <em>His</em> betrothed, and not mine or yours); moreover, many Protestants rebelled against the leadership by elders, and went to the error of &ldquo;independentarian&rdquo; congregations, because that was in their interest (for don&rsquo;t we like to decide for ourselves as we see fit in our own eyes?), but they ignored what was expressed as the desire of God&rsquo;s heart.
</p>
<p>You see, there is a common error of thinking of the church as a New Testament concept. Of course, all over the Bible, starting in Moses, the group of all the Israelites is called &ldquo;all the congregation&rdquo;, this word being the same one for &ldquo;church&rdquo; in translation; and the leadership thereof is explicitly under &ldquo;elders&rdquo;, this word being the &ldquo;presbyters&rdquo; in translation. The book of Ecclesiastes is named with the root word for &ldquo;church&rdquo; (&ldquo;ecclesia&rdquo;), but it is from the Old Testament. Moreover, the New Testament does not bother to define the church as doctrine; it just uses the word, expecting that there is an understanding of it already. The church could be referred to in the Gospels and the Epistles, without even being defined, precisely because it was known prior among the believers. The disciples knew what <em>thing</em> Christ meant when He said &ldquo;&#133; I will build my church &#133;&rdquo; This is why, for instance, Psalm 107 says:<blockquote>Let them extol him in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders.</blockquote>The presbytery is scriptural; the prelacy is heresy. The claim that the bishops are set forth in the scriptures is based on the fact that the word is from the Latin &ldquo;biscopus&rdquo;, which comes from the Greek &ldquo;episcopos&rdquo;. Of course, the epistles were not setting up an elaborate hierarchy, when they recognised that so common an office as the elder would have among it some who are overseers, which is what the Greek word means. This is best set forth by one verse (well, two), 1 Peter 5:1-2, which more than ends the debate:<blockquote>So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly.</blockquote>Note that this is Peter speaking, whom they claim is the beginnig of their heresy. Couldn&rsquo;t he have said he speaks to them as &ldquo;<i>primus inter pares</i>&rdquo; or something? He says he is just an elder like them, even though he is one of the disciples. Then, incidentally, he requires all elders to be overseers, which would commit them to every single prelate being a bishop&mdash;an absurdity for them, but a fitting application of the overseer role on God&rsquo;s part.
</p>
<p>Peter, in the passages that precede, has been speaking to the whole church in general and telling them that their suffering and partaking in the sufferings of Christ is just normal for Christians; but now, in the fifth chapter, Peter is focussed on the elders of the church, and he presents himself as an elder whose Christian <i>bona fides</i> has already been tested and shown forth by the Lord, as he tells them is the normal lot of the Christian. But now imagine a pope, for instance, writing to all papist church leaders&mdash;he would never even dare to say he speaks to them as one of them, but rather would emphasise that he is speaking to them as a superior.
</p>
<p>The Protestants have among them toleration for this evil heresy that demeans the rights of God over His church, and sets men up on a pedestal. The Protestants are not really reformed&mdash;not Reformed&mdash;unless they do not tolerate and commit this wickedness. So the Anglicans and other episcopalian Protestants are, in fact, Protestants; but they are not Reformed. They are Jehu; they are not David. The &ldquo;congregationalist&rdquo;, &ldquo;independentarians&rdquo; and other such wicked men were sent, as per Deuteronomy 7, to test our commitment to the Lordship of Christ: whether indeed we will cling to God and His Word with all our hearts, in spite of either apparent injury to our station, or the seeming inconsequence of the matter. The stone that the Protestant builders refused has become the touchstone. The presbyterian government system alone is scriptural, and that very much. The church is not Reformed, unless it is reformed in doctrine, worship, and government. It is sufficient that a church be reformed in doctrine (for then it would be scriptural through and through, and consequently presbyterian), but this being a case of Jehu-like weakness, this is a part that requires explicit mentioning even after we have mentioned the requirement that the church be reformed in doctrine.
</p>No Amnesty International: India in the Moral Relativism TarpitahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMDm0pwKDA2015-09-13T02:06:57.0000<p>The thing about moral relativism is that it is impractical in real life, and so becomes merely selective application of moral absolutism; so, instead of actually letting all moral standards be equal before their eyes, the relativists instead just settle on a few items as non-negotiable, and let others slide, without feeling the need to justify their inconsistency.<br />
What is moral relativism in theory&mdash;expressed, politically, as secularism&mdash;is selective moral absolutism in practice&mdash;expressed, politically, as democracy (&ldquo;you may vote on anything, but not on the voting itself&rdquo;).
</p>
<p>The reason <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/313775-india-rape-sentence-sisters/">Amnesty International goes astray</a> is because it is moral-relativist. They have got several thousand signatures on a petition to challenge the raping, by law, of a pair of Indian sisters because of a crime their brother committed. There are many things wrong with what Amnesty International did, and I want to go over them.
</p>
<p>(And, funny enough, in that link is an embedded document from Richard Dawkins, the avowed darwinist teacher. &mdash;But on what grounds does a darwinist protest the rape of the young and nubile? That it is not adaptive? That it is not fit? So, you see, even this self-proclaimed darwinist/darwinian cannot contain his post-Christian rage at girls being sentenced to rape, by law, over the crimes of their brother. But he can neither declare that law wrong&mdash;for, then, he would have to abandon the moral relativism which first made darwinism appealing to people like him&mdash;nor yet deny that, in fact, this is exactly what should be considered normal by his worldview.)
</p>
<p>Amnesty International protests the sentence of rape, but does not protest the thing that justifies the sentence in the eyes of the Indians who gave it: the Hindu caste system. How absurd! &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; responds one, &ldquo;They are dealing with this one issue here!&rdquo; Yes; I am also dealing with one issue: that the Indians are heathenous pagans who, if they were saved from their Hinduist idolatry, would just have all these problems go away as a body. The problem is not that people are acting out their Hinduism, or even &ldquo;fanatical Hindus&rdquo;, or &ldquo;extremist islam&rdquo;, or whatever. The problem is that they are not Christians. That&rsquo;s all. &mdash;For if they were Christians, either they would act right, or there would be sound grounds to condemn what they do. But the moral relativist hypocrites, who use a document to feign concern for the people living in darkness, are not really concerned for more than just the <em>show</em> of concern, be they any of those who tweeted, or signed, or Amnesty International itself.
</p>
<p>In the very first case when Moses gives a law to the Israelites&mdash;the very first one&mdash;there occurs this poignant line:<blockquote>There shall be one law for you and the stranger who lives among you.</blockquote>There was to be one law in all the land, &ldquo;in all your territory,&rdquo; and this being one law for the native and the sojourner. From the very first law, God was inserting clauses to deal with the sojourner. Even not allowing a stranger on the Passover meal was explicitly stated, because otherwise he was to be included.
</p>
<p>Now, in the post-Christian West, every other idiot wants to scream &ldquo;Aristotle, in his cosmopolis &#133;&rdquo; as though history begins with the Greeks and Romans. &mdash;And those, too, never had a one-law system, to say nothing of &ldquo;human rights,&rdquo; and they even had castes amongst themselves as a core building block of their societies. (Out of that, Romans gave us words like &ldquo;patrician&rdquo; and &ldquo;plebiscite&rdquo;; as for the Greeks, even their mightiest fighter nation, the Spartans, were destroyed by their obsessive caste system with its dual-law tendencies, which no Western thinker even ever criticised until quite recently.)<br />
But we, who are not post-Christian (and, by the grace of God, will never be, as Isaiah says of us &ldquo;A nation great from now until forever&rdquo;), all the history before Moses is a waste of time and a wandering in the dark, and all the history after him is either proto-Christian orthodoxy or a heretical patch of heathenism.
</p>
<p>(And this is why the evil heresy of &ldquo;independentarianism&rdquo; is truly the worst thing that ever survived under the covers of the &ldquo;Protestant&rdquo; label. For independents are the snake in the camp; they are the root of moral relativism in the Western churches, and consequently even the legitimacy of democrazy. &ldquo;Independetarianism&rdquo; pretends that liberty and anarchy are the same; but the presbyterians have it right: liberty is only such as is given under Christ, and it neither yields to the accursed prelacy of the &ldquo;episcopalians&rdquo; nor goes as far as to deny that God has revealed a structure for the organisation of the congregations in His word, and not left it to the imaginations of hearts that are deceitful above all things and desperately sick.)
</p>
<p>Moral relativists are particularly incapable of condemning a moral system&mdash;whether that is islamic shari&rsquo;a, or for that matter the Mosaic Law (even though they necessarily want, and even need, to condemn this latter because this is how they come to be)&mdash;while in fact other moral systems have no problem condemning the moral relativists. The Indians who insist on the caste system readily condemn the Westerners and their morality, whichever it may be, for we know how immoral, repugnant, and disgusting the mixing of tribes is to people who worship under the swastika; and the muslims say in horror, <a href="http://memritv.org/">on TV</a>, &ldquo;What? Men and women or equal footing? Monogamy? Kill the infidel!&rdquo; But the post-Christian West has covered the face of our glorious Lord with shame, denying Him before the generation of the wicked, and crucifying Him again, naked and abandoned, without a single believer to rally around His name. Nothing remains for those who have ignored and denigrated the call of the Lord, but a fearful expectation of punishment. They have treated as an unworthy thing the blood by which they are saved! And if the ones who ignored the blood of a mere lamb, on the Passover, were cut off at the head and excluded from among the people of God, how much more those who have scorned and trampled under foot the Lamb of God? It is a frightful experience that awaits the post-Christian World: it is terrifying beyond all things, to fall into the hands of the Living God.
</p>
<p>All this said, the problem with the thing of the sisters is not so much the verdict, for there is a culture behind the verdict, and that is what needs to be dealt with. Everybody likes to scream out loud about how &ldquo;India is the World&rsquo;s largest democracy,&rdquo; but they do not decry as loudly and as openly that it is the largest pagan nation. If they democratically voted for the gang-rape of the sisters, the entirety of the West would have nothing to say. They can neither condemn democracy as the sampling of the evil and wicked hearts of men, for to them a democratic vote is an automatic moral victory, nor can they condemn the morality on which the idolatrous nation bases to vote in such wickedness, because that would require that they insist on the superiority of their own moral codes.<br />
Just copying democracy from the Western nations is like drawing pictures of solid pillars on a flimsy clay hut, and saying &ldquo;Behold the pillars!&rdquo; If they were Christian, they could be safely democratic; they would be inevitably well-governed; but while they are pagan, everything is merely giving legitimacy to oppressive, racist, mysoginistic, and heathenous men.
</p>
<p>Things were not always this bad. I think it was Sir Charles (or James?) Napier, the one of the &ldquo;PECCAVI: I have Sind&rdquo; fame (if memory serves&mdash;I write these things offline), who told the Indians to stop their evil habit of burning wives on the pyres of their husbands. This was when Britain was still self-consciously Christian. The Indians insisted on their morality, saying it was correct to burn women alive on pyres when their husbands preceded them in death. Then the Brit insisted that his morality would prevail, even if by blood and iron; this is how the wife-burning habit was expunged from India. Would that, if only to save the women fundamentally, they had continued on and said the God would be Lord over India, even if by blood and iron! &mdash;For anything else is a job half-done. We don&rsquo;t have a problem with any particular evil habit (we are not legalists); we have a problem with heathenous rejection of faith in God (we are reformed Christians).
</p>
<p>Britain committed a sin of greed when she focussed on commerce and spices, instead of on turning India Christian. For if they had turned India Christian, with their blood and money, God would have returned upon them a thousandfold&mdash;rather than the pittance that they got by their own hand&mdash;sons and treasures galore. &ldquo;Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and the rest will be added unto you.&rdquo; They would have had an India that knows nothing but colourful, saffron, indianised Anglicanism, and they would have done the right thing (which they only did once, in the case of Uganda, and even there because God over-ruled their hearts and their desires, for His name&rsquo;s sake), and then God would have fulfilled for them this promise &ldquo;Other nations will serve you, but you will not serve them.&rdquo;
</p>
<p>For God never forbade imperialism&mdash;after all, it is always His work, from Assyria and the Medo-Persians, to the Macedonians and the Romans, to Spain and the Anglosphere. Do you think any nation ever makes itself? Acts 17 tells you: &ldquo;He made all the nations &#133; <em>that they may seek Him</em>.&rdquo; Do you think any nation makes itself mighty? This is the sin and madness of the Germans and their Nazi heathenism, which made them glorify in-breeding because they did not regard God, who alone elevates one and puts down another. &mdash;But when the empire is not a blessing of His to a righteous nation, it is merely a tool in His hand (a rod in His hand, an axe He wields), whose power leaves it inexcusable for not acknowledging Him (for He says &ldquo;for this reason I raised you up, that I may show my glory in you&rdquo;).
</p>
<p>So, back to the Amnesty International petition. The sentence said that the sisters should be paraded naked, with their faces blackened&mdash;a reference to, and emphasis of, their lower-caste status that is the real reason for all the outrage among the Indians&mdash;but the Amnesty International petition said nothing in protest to this. How is it that they will leave clearly-expressed caste-based segregation intact, and yet expect to overthrow the necessary results thereof?<br />
Moreover, the moral relativists cannot condemn the Hinduism, but it decrees worse than just blackened faces for lower-caste people who dare the system; for their accursed scriptures decree that boiling oil be poured into the ears of lower-caste people who so much as dare not to flee from (or, gods forbid, step into) the shadow of an upper-caste man.<br />
And the stupid Amnesty International and the darwinian Dawkins and all the accursed relativist post-Christian Westerners, who excel at feigning rage, would protest as &ldquo;extremist, radical, fanatical&rdquo; a pious Hindu man who sought to return to the basics of the true Hinduism, and pour boiling oil in the ears of the sisters. But the fanatical idolater would condemn them justly before God, whom he does not even know; for God even tells the Israelites &ldquo;Check among the tents of Kedar; has any nation ever abandoned its gods? Yet My people have forsaken me.&rdquo;
</p>
<p>Besides that, the house of the sisters was looted. There is no protest against that. And indeed, this is what calls out the emotional pretenders who sought to feign concern over this issue. For if robbery of the innocent is wrong, why did they not call it out? Or should we rob the houses of the innocent, as long as we do no rape them?<br />
But a sound morality, like that of the Bible, would condemn all that in one fell swoop, not because one is outrageous to us and the other is not, but because it is all outrageous to God. &ldquo;For the One who said &lsquo;Do not murder&rsquo; also said &lsquo;Do not covet your neighbour&rsquo;s things.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br />
You have an India that has no coherent, well-rooted argument against the mass-murder of girls in the womb, and what response will it have to just the rape of two? In the eyes of every boy born in the last two generations, women have been a burden and little more than a help to orgasms; they have been killed in droves by their own parents. Why should they now act so horrified that these stupid things are being put to the use for which they survived the womb at all? All of India has no sound argument against abortion&mdash;and whatever speaks contrary to the murders can be voted down, therefore it is not binding to the expressed sentiment and practice of the majority&mdash;how will it master up one against rape?
</p>
<p>Moreover, the root cause of the conflict was that a woman of higher caste was forced to marry a man of his caste, while in fact she loved another man, who was of lower caste. She eloped with the lower-caste man, and this started the trouble. In all the silliness of Amnesty International, the issue of forcible marriage is not dealt with, even though the &ldquo;Declaration of Human Rights&rdquo; that they claim to be defenders and promoters of deals explicitly with this issue. There was an age when the people of the Earth were obsessed with declarations and documents of this nature, infected with it by the Americans and tolerant of the consequent flow of inconsistent ammendments and tentative clarifications, and they all forgot that simple hermeneutics could deal with everything from one source, <i>even</i> the Bible. Numbers 36 does not just give the women the rights to land inheritance that are, even today, absolutely far and away out of sight of democratic India&rsquo;s best efforts, it emphasises that they may choose their husbands &ldquo;as they see fit.&rdquo;<blockquote>The heads of the fathers' houses of the clan of the people of Gilead the son of Machir, son of Manasseh, from the clans of the people of Joseph, came near and spoke before Moses and before the chiefs, the heads of the fathers&rsquo; houses of the people of Israel. They said, “The Lord commanded my lord to give the land for inheritance by lot to the people of Israel, and my lord was commanded by the Lord to give the inheritance of Zelophehad our brother to his daughters. But if they are married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the people of Israel, then their inheritance will be taken from the inheritance of our fathers and added to the inheritance of the tribe into which they marry. So it will be taken away from the lot of our inheritance. &#133;&rdquo; And Moses commanded the people of Israel according to the word of the Lord, saying &#133; &ldquo;This is what the Lord commands concerning the daughters of Zelophehad: ‘Let them marry whom they think best, only they shall marry within the clan of the tribe of their father.&rsquo;&rdquo;</blockquote>Now, incidentally, this problem shows up because women have the same rights to inheritance in a patrilineal society; yet if they are such heirs, they are to maintain their tribe&rsquo;s land holdings by marrying <em>freely</em> within the tribe. Now, the accursed feminists would screech at the limits placed on the women, not even realising that India&mdash;where women are burned when their husbands die&mdash;is otherwise the norm outside of the Bible; they do not regard the many marriage limits placed on the men as restrictions, for instance, more-severe or worth protesting against as much as those placed on the women, for they, being accursed under Eve, pant and lust after exactly what the men have, and spurn and despise that which is different about them, because the men and their status is their ideal when they are living under the curse. &ldquo;He shall lord it over you, and your desire shall be to him.&rdquo; So feminism doesn&rsquo;t even fix the problem of the women, because it is merely the desire to be &ldquo;[insert whatever] like the men!&rdquo; Feminism is just envy of male chauvinism, and the regard of the prevailing masculine expressions as an ideal to pursue, rather than an affirmation of the under-appreciated crucialness of the prevailing female roles, which are not to be abandoned or changed, but rather appreciated more. Besides, feminism will always fail to liberate the women, because they make poor equivalents of men; not just physiologically (which is why whatever feminism gets men have to give, while whatever male chauvinism gets it simply takes), but also because the decree of God cannot be over-ruled by blind and envious stupidity.
</p>
<p>The real danger in the moral relativism of these self-proclaimed defenders of the wicked and illegitimate self-proclaimed moral standard of the World is that they are worse than simple permissiveness. So they excuse India from the constant condemnation that they heap on, say, North Korea, just because India is democratic (for some definition thereof). In fact, India is more-dangerous to women <em>and Christians</em> than North Korea will ever be. They have excused the fact that an unrepentant idolater like Narendra Modi is elected to be President, and that the laws allow this&mdash;how can a man who bows to images and worships the work of men&rsquo;s hands be permitted anywhere near any podium for any reason?&mdash;and then obsessed over the fact that such laws consequently follow through on the outright insane foundations upon which they are built.
</p>
<p>And nobody has a response to this who is a secularist, because that is basically what it means and takes to have moral relativism as the moral stance of a nation; and this, in turn, is acted out as selective moral absolutism.
</p>
<p>A correct response to the issue of the sisters being sentenced to rape would be to condemn all India, not in spite of its being democratic, but precisely because it is the largest democracy, which may enforce whatever evil men (like the ones who passed the sentence) vote into law. For without this, all that is left is that the many upper-caste people rally to vote wickedness into the constitution. A correct morality can condemn all men, and stand alone right against the united opinion of everything that can think; as it is written: Let God be true and every man a liar. God is true even when every man is a liar.<br />
The correct fix would not be to front the Declaration of Human Rights, which insists that people should be able to vote on whether it is worth looking at (and it is not), but rather to insist that India be a sacralist Christian state, which enforces the truths which alone are true and incontrovertibly-so. Even if it erred, then, and murdered girls and raped women, it could be charged with wrong on the basis of a true law which, moreover, is not changeable: the word of God.
</p>
<p>Many people all over the World continue to be victims because those who would have defended them, that they get the liberty which they also have had in the parts of the World that benefitted from the Reformation, have all turned against the Lord who saved them, and scorned the covenants and testaments by which He liberated them and glorified them, and have said in their hearts that they know better. &ldquo;So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels,&rdquo; as He said in Psalm 81. Hence democracy, from the time when the Stuart kings purjured with God, the days of Pride&rsquo;s Purge and Oliver Cromwell the independentarian, when the men who had before them the example of a nation living and walking with God turned their backs on Him and His word.
</p>
<p>The women of India suffer, and are murdered in droves even before they are outside of the womb, not because there is no democracy, but because there is no lordship of Christ in that land. Anybody who feels anything for the women of India should first feel outraged that idols lord it over that nation, and which decree forth the shedding of blood. And unless a people are Christian, there is no justification for the men being on equal footing with women, and daughters being as prized. Only in Christ is there &ldquo;Neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female, neither slave nor free; but all are one in Christ Jesus.&rdquo; Otherwise, those women, like all others, will be quivering under the hand of Adam, to whom they were subjected for the sin of Eve. There is no way out of the curse of God, except in Christ.
</p>
<p>Similarly, muslims suffer the most from islam and its murderous tyranny, because the Christians will not oppose the islam under which these people suffer; for, indeed, the old Christian nations have abandoned God. The muslims kill more muslims than they kill Christians, and the leading cause of the murder of muslims is the decree to murder that is found in islam itself; if indeed anybody truly loves muslims&mdash;even if because he is himself a muslim&mdash;the first thing he should do is turn against and oppose the islam itself. It is an evil and murderous heresy.
</p>
<p>And the fix, in every single case, is the same: that Jesus Christ be Lord over the land, that the kings kiss the Son, and everything be subject to God.
</p>Linux is Even Worse than (Just) UnixahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICJ3poKDA2015-09-06T08:01:34.0000<p>When Linux came out, the World was excited about, not the fact that it was a “free Unix”—for there were many of those, already—but because it was an “open source” Unix. It is important, also, to understand that the World was not excited about the fact that it was “free software”, because the licence it uses (the GNU Public Licence—GPL) is not free; rather, the World was excited about its being “open source.”
</p>
<p>As a propaganda (“marketing”) term, “open source” was a brilliant coup and a roaring success. It was finely managed by men like Eric S. Raymond (esr), even to the chagrin of other supporters like Richard Stallman (rms), the architect of the licence, the GPL, which he considered “free” (even though it is not), and who preferred that it be called “free software.” Alas, among anglophones, it required the constant qualification of “free as in free speech”, which “open source” didn’t need. Journalists prefer not to qualify sentences, leave alone phrases or—Heaven forfend—buzzwords.
</p>
<p>All that said, the main attraction was the development model of Linux, which, at the time, the journalists found to be intriguing, novel, exciting, and a serious challenge to the model of the then-dominant players in the kernel/operating systems World, both within the Unix tradition and without. Here were underdogs taking a different strategy, a collaborative method, full of the “hacker” spirit, and posing a serious challenge to the big players. So the journalists shouted from the rooftops about how revolutionary the Linux systems were; the kernel and the operating systems (distributions) built on top of it. Because the GPL was not free, requiring perpetuation of the GPL’s very terms in all derivative works, the revolution was to be locked in permanently, in the event of the success of Linux.
</p>
<p>The people who marketed Linux, in particular esr, sold the worst features of it, because these were the most-exciting both to media and to the wide-eyed kids who found in the revolutionary hacker spirit a calling and a cause. So esr had a main mantra, that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” The unthinking newbie thinks this is a good thing; the journalists can see nothing wrong with it; so it caught on. The problem with that, of course, is that it encourages focus on <em>more eyeballs</em>, which is unsustainable and stupid, rather than focus on <em>less bugs</em> which is right. Who cares if you have a million shallow bugs? I want no bugs there! And Linux bears sickening witness to the shallowness of that particular orientation of the open source movement. Moreover, the multiplicity of eyeballs was not exactly subtractive of bugs—after all, how do bugs get there in the first place? As Edgar Djikstra said, if debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them there. And the <i>Mythical Man Month</i> should have warned against so <em>blindly</em> increasing eyeballs, because that is guaranteed to merely increase on the bugs, even as it makes them shallow—which it doesn’t. This, in fact, is the biggest problem with open source: all those programmers do not reduce on the fundamental challenges of software development. It is not as though we had no sound software, or that there were no well-established ways of dealing with bugs, before open source. —And of all the methods that have ever been actually tried, “more eyeballs” has never distinguished itself.
</p>
<p>Consider the horrible difficulty of changing what programming language is used in a Linux operating system.<br />
This is no idle experiment: the <em>first successful Linux operating system</em> (“distribution”)—successful, because Microsoft panicked enough about it to buy it outright—achieved such success by, first of all, committing to building the operating system tools in a different language from the shit the rest of them are built with. I am talking of Linspire, also called “Lindows” at some point. The reason I can give the trophy, unqualified, is because it declared by that horrid name, Lindows, that it was going to be the Linux that unseats Windows. This is something Linux had got famous for attempting from the beginning, and Linus Torvalds once featured in a CNN special that spun the thing as Microsoft Windows’ nightmare stepped out into all four dimensions; and every year since then, stupid Linux fanboys have been declaring the year of Linux on the Desktop. They have been wrong every time, because they line up behind stupid marketing games like Ubuntu, or whatever else the fuck is copying Windows this time (rather than, for once, actually challenging Windows). —But Linspire! How inspiring! And how common-sense. They actually saw that Windows could be only passed by <em>not</em> copying it, for crying out loud. So they moved to functional programming, first OCaml, then—an inspired decision—Haskell. But one scheming Microsoft is smarter than all the emotive open source fanboys put together, so it paid for Linspire and smothered it; they knew they could not pull ahead by copying, either; better by killing. And if Microsoft could not shift over to Haskell (in spite of being the main sponsor of its development, for decades), what chance does any Linux distro, with its scattered contributors who are not even being paid to learn the new approach? After all, they contribute because they already know the languages and approaches; nobody can require of them more than they already have.
</p>
<p>Programming languages are <em>the only interface</em> a programmer has to the bits he claims to be shuffling about. It is not a trivial matter. It is such a crucial point, in fact, that any claim to be dealing with the multiplicity of bugs, which doesn’t deal with the programming language, is like trying to fix the thermal properties of a room without <em>considering</em> the windows and ventilators, but only the wall insulation.<br />
So, for instance, rather than esr’s nonsense, here is something you can take home and set on the table: with enough type-checking, all bugs are shallow. If there were an operating system that used Standard ML, for instance, every bug would be a matter of breaking down the offending data type into the buggy case and the other cases—even with a naïve application of the <code>option</code> data type—and then the compiler would scream out from the rooftop every bug written in behind closed doors, and bring into broad day light, for eyeballs to see, every last bug heretofore hidden in the darkness. This is the Curry-Howard isomorphism (and one university programmer, his PhD assistant, and Microsoft Research funding) doing the work; not more programmers, not more eyeballs. The bullshit esr sold to the World, though sounding nice, was not only the wrong solution, it was also unproven. And better one PhD working on the compiler, than one thousand sloppy script kiddies “debugging Linux.”
</p>
<p>And the programming approach is the only thing that actually affects the rate of bugs released. For this reason, the rightful heir to Linspire, in the Linux world, is NixOS. Of course, it is an illegitimate child, first, and then an heir by convoluted tracing of the family tree, because Nix, the most-core tool and approach in the distribution, though it is itself declarative and functional and civilised, unlike all the other nonsense that other Linux programmers are ageing in pursuit of, such that they would still be failures even if they actually achieved their goal, it is still not written in a declarative functional programming language.<br />
Haskell is older than Java. It is from 1987. Since that time, it has not been in question how to program properly. But idiots today pretend that they are inventing the future, when they are coding in what was no longer cutting edge by the time an operating system had to placed on top of the Linux kernel. You have a language that pretends that requiring programmers to remember to pass in the length of the data—and to remember to get it right—is easier and cleaner and smaller and less-wasteful than appending a count on every pointer. After all, “We are doing low-level programming!”— This is a design bug, and now we know that the cost is not in RAM, but in server break-ins. Yet even the RAM is not spared, because the programmer will allocate stack space for the length value, anyway, and pass it around. It may have been thought smart to let the programmer deal with his counts himself, back then, but why would anybody still support this trade-off now? And why would anybody <em>use</em> such a bug-encouraging system? And it’s not even 1987 anymore! “Speed! Speed!” Does anybody still buy that? Even after OCaml and MLton and GHC?<br />
Yet if C had <em>just</em> delimited pointers (for lack of a better name), it would be even safer to program in than PHP will ever be; for then every single buffer over-flow—every last security breach you have heard of—would have been resolved in the 1970s with an iterating library. You see, all reliable PHP-built CMS apps are more-complex than half of the Linux kernel. All reliable web frameworks are more-complex than the other half. But all that effort is a waste, because it is seated above a bug. The price we pay for relying on the mal-educated inertia that open source encourages and that all the other Linux distributions epitomise is much higher—huger, bigger, far, far more-vast—than we would if we built up four functional-declarative operating systems from scratch every year.
</p>
<p>And the Linux kernel itself is shit, because it is neither an improvement on Plan 9, nor aware that it is not an improvement on Plan 9. (Plan 9 is shit; but so is Linux. An improvement on Plan 9 would not be, but Linux is not one such, either.) Unix operating systems, in this decade, are sheer inertia and artefacts of system-level economic collapse; Linux is the best example. Unix is a work-around; Linux acts like it is a platonic ideal. Unix is, by the confession of those who should know, desperately in need of an improvement; Linux is a faithful rendition of the bug. “Oh,” reacts one in the crowd, “Linux is trying to implement Unix; it is not Linux’ fault that Unix sucks!” Fine; but Linux, when properly-done, will be a crappy and stupid failure from the early nineties. The Linus-Tanenbaum debates should have ended with someone saying “But who cares how you design your bug?”
Since no Unix operating system—built in C, as a basic identifying principle—will ever be secure, why are you wasting time pretending you are getting there? And that is just security.
There are all these work-arounds, from the file system to the terminals, that achieve little more than spending on archaic mistakes good, serious effort that should be spent on doing different things differently, one of which may work, rather than the one thing that has already failed in the one way that has already failed. And, no, kernels are not hard (if you can <em>understand</em> a PHP-written CMS, you are over-qualified); popular kernels are hard, though, because successful marketing is hard.
</p>
<p>Then there is the problem that once a project goes open source, it is harder to control. This is nice if all you are doing is hobbyism and toys. (This is why Linux is stuck there: hobbyism and toying about. I know someone will say “But so-and-so, who/which is no joker, but a big company/industry, is using Linux crucially!” What did so-and-so use before? Is so-and-so, or the associated “procurement department”, poorer or more-stupid or lazier now? Do you know? But I know a toy when I see one.) In reality, if you want to produce a dependable product, you are going to <em>have to</em> go cathedral, rather than bazaar. Ideals always sound good on paper, especially when they have not been tried yet, otherwise they are not ideals, and they are not inspiring. Open source was both ideal and inspiring, because it was on paper and had not really been tried yet. Of all the successful open source projects, both the ones cited back then and the ones I know of now, the control of the project—the “gather” phase of the “scatter-gather” approach, as it were—is where the quality comes from.<br />
In my opinion, this failure or refusal to distinguish between the phases of any project—those that can <em>survive</em> being open source, retaining dependability, and those that <em>would not</em>—is the grossest thing about all the propaganda of the open source movement. I mean, for simple instance, marketing (read: selling) the product <em>never</em> survives being open source; and this is, unfortunately, part of every dependable product (where dependability takes into consideration psychological factors, which, admittedly, the open source movement is almost pathologically incapable of considering).
</p>
<p>What actually hinders the esr chant about the eyeballs from being even occasionally true is that the open source approach leaves forking as a subjective necessity. So forks are neither all-bad nor all-good, not even in any particular project. Would that, on this, they were either hot or cold! But they are lukewarm, and the results are outright emetic. There are one thousand half-implemented versions of every worthwhile piece of software in the Linux world. They are all crappy, without exception, because none of them is <em>the</em> one piece of software. This is not trivial: no piece of software is anything but crappy unless it is <em>the</em> one answer to that problem. So, for instance, GNU binutils is <em>the</em> one answer to the “Unix utilities on Linux” question. If anybody ever forks any GNU utilities, he is a heretic and should have his properties confiscated, and his hanged body burnt at the merkat cross as a warning to all other wicked malignants. Emacs is <em>the</em> one answer to the “over-zealous, over-weight, unkempt, unshaven, Karl Marx-like ‘text editor’ operating subsystem” question—an important and common-enough question, for we need where to send the heretical allophyles and say to them “out! go and implement your godlessness there, with a lisp!” Vi is <em>the</em> one answer to the text editor question. Vim is <em>the</em> one answer to the “modern vi” question. mutt is <em>the</em> one answer to “e-mail on the terminal” question. If you fork, you are accursed; if you create an alternative, you are evil; if you disagree, you are wrong.<br />
Imagine the evil of forking, say, Perl or Python or Ruby. This is why these are not crappy: there is <em>the</em> one programming language that replaces shell; <em>the</em> one modern alternative to it; <em>the</em> one alternative to both. There is one httpd—Apache—and so it is not crappy, even when it doesn’t suffice for those times when sensible system design requires that you use an alternative (lighttpd, nginx, unicorn, whatever). But you do not fork those, otherwise you are exactly the evil sinner we have been wanting to make an ensample of.
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<p>But the open source community rebels against this standard; it has no wherewithal to condemn a fork of GNU binutils. And because it lacks this, there is no way to say that all these extra eyeballs are looking at the original bugs, rather than their own new, forked-off ones. The open source people rebel against this obsessive exclusivity, preferring obsessive multipliability (even if they then condemn multiplicity). Their problem is like that of the stupid and inconsistent moral relativists, who insist that everyone is right to himself, and yet complain when I celebrate and proclaim the rightness and goodness of trapping and quick-burning moral relativists at the stake.<br />
This is why Linux has no good PDF reader. To create something as smooth and responsive as Apple’s Preview takes more focus and effort than all the open source people will ever be able to generate, both in theory and in practice. Remember, the problem is emphatically <em>not</em> in the smoothness and responsiveness; it is in the absence of exclusivity—having <em>the</em> PDF reader that is smooth and responsive, rather than <em>a</em> PDF reader (none of which, in the Linux world, are both smooth <em>and</em> responsive).<br />
This is also the problem with Firefox. When it was <em>the</em> web browser, it was great! It was, hands-down, <em>the</em> best browser on a PC; it was not crappy. But now you have its re-skins and other open source competitors, and it is crappier than they are—and they themselves are crappy. This is also never going to be fixed, because Chromium/Chrome is/are not going away. Farewell, then, to good web surfing on Linux, forever. (It is not a very different situation on the Mac’s OS X, for instance, but there is a non-crappy browser on iOS, and it is not because there isn’t enough choice/diversity/firethings: it is because, there, Safari is <em>the</em> browser. On Android, Chrome is <em>the</em> browser; therefore surfing there even has a chance of not being crappy—and it achieves it.)
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<p>“But,&ldquo; cries out one, “in that case you are saying that the open source approach can never do a good operating system!&rdquo; Yes. If you thought it was an easy-enough thing, look at your security and bug record and remember: it is easier to invade a nation and endanger its airspace and read its government e-mails at your leisure and blast propaganda at its citizens non-stop than it is to create a sound operating system. If you approach it like it is a hobby project, a toy, or an augmentation of such, you are not even wrong. If you would do military-grade systems this way, you are not even trying. An operating system like Linux wanted to be when it grew up <em>is</em> a military-grade system—or, at least, is supposed to be. If the type-checking above the kernel will still let through “<code>NullPointerException</code>”, or if the programming style is prone to “<code>ArrayBoundsException</code>”, or if you are using Java … just stop and go away. If your kernel is programmed like the improvement on C89 is C99, go and die.
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<p>Now, there is the Three-Clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD3) licence, which, though freer than the GPL, is also not free; it does not require perpetuation of the licence terms, but only citational reference to them. There were already some Unixes under the BSD licence, by the time Linux was started. Indeed, since 2009-2010, I have operated a strict policy of having only FreeBSD on all official server systems where we need a Unix, and I banned Linux completely. It is allowed on desktop systems, and I am actually typing this on an Ubuntu Linux laptop, which means that I have a continual and constant reminder of just how bad Linux is when compared to other Unix systems. Even the thing for which I use Linux—compatibility with cheap, off-the-shelf PC hardware—it is actually a very poor performer. I cannot critique too much here, because the FreeBSD sector I have on this laptop cannot even run the Wi-Fi; then again, this is a Lenovo E531, with the worst Wi-Fi antenna that ever came under “QC Passed”, such that when I need to actually work online, I use an ethernet cable, which works under FreeBSD. But then, FreeBSD for laptops is called OS X.
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<p>Of course, the only free “licence” is the public domain—because it is literally <em>no licence</em> at all—of course, which is why I put all my software code in the public domain, if I want to share it, short of which I keep it private. (Private code is not necessarily secret; it is just private. If someone accesses it, he still can’t use it, because it would be a shame for him for stealing. His conscience can do more to stop him than any number of over-wrought legal clauses ever will. And if his conscience does not, nothing will—but God will judge him, and that should suffice for everybody, as it does for me.)<br />
I also work on a project, programming embedded software, that requires that I duck into a Windows installation from time to time, which is why I cannot be using a Mac, as would be sane. Now, of course, the reason it is sane to be running the regrettably-named Darwin kernel and its OS X operating system is because Darwin is basically a renamed FreeBSD, and OS X is programmed properly (that is, aware that the 1960s are not a high point in programming language design), unlike well nigh any Linux operating system I have ever seen.<br />
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<p>Oh, this reminds me: one fatal problem with Linux is that the lead programmer, Linus Torvalds, is a confessed idiot. I once read his long and passionate argument to a Linux e-mail list, where he justified the approach that Linux was developed under by reference to darwinian evolutionary theory. He said, if memory serves, in defence of the haphazard way in which Linux is developed—the stupidity that let in the OOMKiller, among all sorts of other systemic embarassments, many of which he defended and perhaps which survive until today—saying “But do you know what else was developed that way? The most complex system we know of: you.”<br />
How idiotic! Remember this, because it is true whether you agree or not: if any man can justify believing the neo-darwinian evolutionary theory to be true, he is too stupid to program anything properly. Even if the theory were true, which it is not, it would still be a reliable sign of incapacity to build sound, reliable software if any man could justify believing in it. So: even if it had happened, all good software developers would be wrong about the origin of the species. No exceptions. (The last time I saw anybody try to program while mouthing the stupidity of darwinism, he was coding “METHINKS IT LOOKS LIKE A WEASEL”, and he believed that the creation and its process was anything like darwinian evolution. He also says “It’s a fact, like gravity!’ except that his grandfathers believed in the fact of gravity, but not darwinism; so, no, it is not “a fact like gravity!” Unlike gravity, it requires careful brainwashing, deep-seated biases, and a well-husbanded anti-creatorist animus.)<br />
And, you know, we have more fossils—and evidence of evolution—for the Linux kernel than we do for anything else on the planet. —Yet if anybody can look at those fossils and <em>believe</em> that they evolved as neo-darwinian evolutionary theory says (undirected mutation, then selection, iterated over time), he would be incapable of properly copying an archaic kernel, leave alone designing a new one. <em>Even if</em> Linux had, in fact, evolved by undirected mutation and consequent selection (and, this being Linus’ project, it very well may have), anybody who believed that—in spite of its hypothetical truth and verity—would be incapable of any good work.
</p>When God Has Made One Wise—or Rich, or RulerahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMC-vYgJDA2015-09-03T11:29:30.0000<p>There is this thing that occurs in Exodus, which is repeated also in many other places, where God says “Behold, I have called Bezalel by name … and put in him a spirit of wisdom and skill” to be the head of the artists who fashioned the tabernacle of Exodus. In chapter 36, for instance, you find the opening verse referring to Bezalel and Eliab, “and every workman in whom God had put a spirit of wisdom and understanding to execute the work”, and that is the pattern elsewhere.
Nobody is wise of his own accord. As with other good things, this comes from the Father of Lights. And, as is the case whenever men are called, this is always due to God’s own will, not due to any good in the one called—wherefore none can boast before God.
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<p>What I want to discuss, here, is two-fold: that some people regard with envy and jealousy those in whom God has put a spirit of wisdom, to their own self-condemnation and destruction; and that some people regard it as pious to be falsely-modest about it, when God has made them wise, thereby insulting and reviling God—may they be anathema—showing faithlessness, deceitfulness (for God cannot have lied), and flattery of mere men rather than seeking the glory of God.
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<p>And we have a particularly clear example of this in the story of Joseph. He was speaking the truth when he told his brothers that he had received clear signs, in his dreams, that indeed the rest of the would bow to him. Rather than studying that, as we do, for what value is in it, concerning the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—they fell into the trap of envy and jealousy.<br />
Now, if it had been that God had not promised to make Joseph tower over them, as the dreamer claimed, they would not be to blame for his deceitfulness. But had Joseph been unduly modest, denying the gift of God because his stiff-necked brothers had touchy egos, he would have been deceitful. Imagine, if, in line with their expectations, these dreams had been given to their father, Jacob, or to the eldest son, such that they said “Of course! Any news?” But now, as it stands, they were led away into grievous sin because they did not believe.
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<p>Moreover, they are condemned by the words of Pharaoh, a heathen pagan, who said of Joseph “is there any man like this one, in whom is the Spirit of God?” And Joseph, a condemned Hebrew slave sold by his own brothers (not just a last-born son any more), was made to sit on the right hand of the Pharaoh, as a type of Christ—and rules among the Gentiles as Lord and Bread of Life—even among these Egyptians to whom it is an abomination to eat with a Hebrew. God says to His Son, “Ask of me and I will give you the heathens for your inheritance.” Wherefore now we are Christians. For, as Paul makes very clear, God does not repent, and His calling is eternal. Whether Joseph be in a dungeon, the Word of God is not chained; and it will never return to Him empty-handed, but will accomplish all that He has said. Those whose envy and jealousy drives them into stupid rages against those who have been called and blessed and elevated by God sin against their own souls.
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<p>Moses, also, in Genesis 4, sinned against God, “and God was very angry with Moses”, when Moses had said “Oh, but I do not know how to speak! Appoint another able person …” and God had told him “Who has fashioned the mouth of man? Who has made the hearing-impaired, the deaf, the sighted, and the blind? Isn’t it I, God? Just go, and I will make your mouth fluent.” But Moses, steeped in the wickedness we are discussing here, answered back to God “Send an able person!” Wherefore the Lord was very angry with him—the first time that Moses made God angry.
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<p>Now, notice there that God takes all responsibility for making the slow and the fast. It is just as in the case of “that awful decree” of election and reprobation. God is in charge of everything; no ifs, no buts, no funny business. If someone is fluent, and therefore has no such stumbling-block before his consideration of ministry, saying in his heart “I am fluent of tongue!” that is all very well, but not because of his own self; rather, it is because of God, who made the stutterer and the fluent. If a man be a stammerer, that too is the work of God—and, if he wants fluency, and receives it, that is also because of God, who opens up mouths and seals up eyes. (Wherefore Christ said “Not for his sin, nor his parents’ sin, was this man born blind; but for the glory of God.”)
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<p>Also, God alone confers wealth and office. These are too well-settled as sound doctrine—too well-attested as scriptural teaching—that it doesn’t serve much to belabour the point.<br />
When Jesus was led away to Pontius Pilate, although Pilate was sinning, Jesus did not deny that, first of all, Pilate had authority, that, secondly, it was by God’s decree, and that, third, it was not terminated now just because Pilate was one of those committing this grave sin of killing the One In Whom Is No Sin. In John’s account, you find that Caiaphas has a prominent role <em>as high priest that year</em> because, even though his advice, that Jesus should die instead of the whole nation, was sinful and murderous plotting, he had been chosen as high priest, and, even in his sin, officiated as such. God had not repented of His call to Caiaphas; wherefore even his incidental words became fulfilment of prophecy, and the ultimate execution of the office to which Aaron’s descendants were called.
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<p>Moreover, when Jesus could have saved Himself by a false modesty, denying before Pilate that He was a king, He had to confess the truth: indeed I am a king, and for this reason I came. He confessed that He was the King of the Jews, and that by eternal Divine decree.<br />
We have seen, then, that no man has any right to claim to have over-ridden the call and gift of God, and that it would be sin to deny the truth which God has ordained. This holds in all such cases, because of He Who Calls. Moreover because it is a call of God, rooted in His secret counsel, we are not bound to it because we can justify it: wherefore the youngest can be the head, “the elder will serve the younger,” and this, too, being decided by God “before any of them has done good or bad, that God’s purpose in election should stand.” If God’s purpose, in the calling, depended on them, it would not stand; but it doesn’t depend on them—it depends on God alone—that it should stand.
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<p>Unfortunately, as it was with Joseph’s brothers, so it is today. When a man is shown by God among his fellows to have been blessed, no man, by his own fleshly nature, will immediately impute it upon God. This is why many people claim to have tricks for success—whether which schools, universities, careers, or methods—other than the one trick that works: turning to God. This is to be expected of men in the flesh; it is not surprising.<br />
Nevertheless, it is well-attested: the elder ones take most offence when the younger is glorified by God, and those with a higher and better education take the most offence when a man less-educated than them is shown forth by God as wiser than them. They then sin against their own souls, by envy and jealousy. Their sin begins by their &ldquo;not knowing the power of God, nor the things written, and they go astray—they go far astray.” If they knew why one man is wiser than another, they would not be jealous, because what is one clay jar that the other should envy it? As Moses told the Israelites, “Who is Moses and Aaron, that you should grumble against them? Why do you test God?” The wise one, regardless of his claims, is not responsible for his wisdom. Neither the well-educated one, nor the fluent one. But if you ignore this, you have already started to sin against your soul, imputing upon man what is the preserve of God alone, and then falling into pride or envy, which are sins against your very soul.
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<p>When a man is shown forth as wealthy, it is God’s doing that he is wealthy. If such a man denies that he is rich—for we live with cultures, now, that glorify this false modesty—he commits the sin of deceit, and then many sins consequent to that (for instance, that he is consequently not required to behave to the poor as the rich should, and he doesn’t glorify God with the wealth He gave Him, not getting for God a harvest of thanksgiving from poverty-stricken lips by anonymous gifts, as commanded by the Lord—let not your left hand know the donation of your right hand—for, as Moses said, “the poor shall always be with you, therefore I charge you this day to help them” and the psalmist added &ldquo;to You, O Lord, the poor commits himself, for You note mischief and vexation”). Just acting poor while one is rich requires constant deceitfulness; and people do not bless their parents, or their neighbours, or their congregations, or their communities, or their wives, or their children, or their God, because they are feigning poverty. May they be anathema.<br />
But when God has made you rich, celebrate; call your neighbours and tell them the goodness of the Lord to you, and say, with the psalmist, “In what shall I repay the Lord for all the goodness and kindness He has shown me?”<br />
The accursed ones sin against their own souls, either by thinking that they made themselves rich, or by denying the evident fact of their blessing—that they are rich.<br />
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<p>But the more-common damnable thing is those who are envious and jealous of the rich, as though they did it themselves. They sin against their own souls—and often go all the way to theft, murder, and so on, especially with inherited wealth (“old money”) and so-called over-night success, which, more than all other cases, shows most-clearly the hand of God in decreeing forth the wealthy and the poor alike, with no regard to their efforts, being &ldquo;due neither to the one who wills nor to the one who runs, but to Him who calls.”
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<p>Obviously, the same goes for positions of authority. And for this reason democracy is a horrible heresy and a stupid idea. <em>Power does not belong to the people!</em> Power belongs to God, and to God alone. “The kingdom of men belongs to God; He gives it to whomsoever He wants to.” If God desires to raise a harsh ruler up, whether it be bad that he be harsh (as in Isaiah 19), God shall have His way—and all fault is with us, for He cannot be charged with wrong. This is why He tells Pharaoh “For this reason I raised you up.” and He raised up Nebuchadnezzer, and He raised up Cyrus—for His own glory, due to His own will. Power belongs to Him.<br />
But the democratic heresy allows people to store up in their hearts envy and jealousy, and to let it fester and ferment, and they scream condemnation upon themselves, and sin against their souls. They think—having been deceived by pagan Greek homosexual philosophers—that the leaders are the work of man, and that therefore they should be judged and either appointed or dismissed by men. None of the leaders whom God ever raised up, like Herod and Nero, for instance, were ever raised up because they were pious saints; that is why their acting like wicked heathens is not what causes them to be dismissed by God. These things are merely true, whether we hate the fact of them (as is natural—see the remonstrant arminian heretics, for instance), or we love the fact of them (as is revealed by the Spirit to enlightened eyes—see the Canons of Dort, for instance).
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<p>On the other hand, sound doctrine permits only of the result of contention (as with most royal dynasties) and lot (as with the high priests of the Bible, and things like primogeniture and gender parametrised over prevailing culture), because <a href="http://www.truecovenanter.com/reformedpresbyterian/reformed_presbytery_testimony_against_immoralities.html#reformed_presbytery_testimony_against_immoralities_02_lots">those God has ordained</a> as an expression of His will. Moreover, He has roundly rejected, in many places in the Bible, that the heart of man “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” should be the one to choose, by its own good pleasure, and then He be accused of being responsible for it. 1 Samuel 8 is not against kings—because neither is Deuteronomy 17—but it is against democrats. May they be anathema. Indeed, 1 Samuel 16 goes on to affirm Deuteronomy 17 and, one more time for emphasis, denounce <em>the very basis</em> of democracy in the case when God, rather than man, chooses the king.
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<p>Yet, indeed, the reason I wrote this was to reprove the sin of envying the wise. For I am wise, myself, having been given a spirit of wisdom and understanding and skill, by God, the Father Almighty. This is not something I can change—&ldquo;for who can resist His will?” And who am I, mere man, to talk back to God?—and it is not something I am at liberty to deny, either, for it would be better for me to be ignorant of His blessing to us—&ldquo;even us, whom He has called” to whom &ldquo;Christ has become wisdom, righteousness, and power from God”—than to be continually deceitful about this, His work. Remember the sin of Assyria! For while God says “Assyria, my handiwork, and Israel, my inheritance,” He charges Assyria with denying His creation of them—“shall the axe glory itself without the Hand that cuts with it?”—as He charges Israel with denying His ownership of them—“go check among the Kedarites; has any nation ever abandoned its deity?” I am the handiwork of God—to His glory alone (<i>soli Deo gloria</i>), for I am reformed by His very hand. <br />
But, for everybody blessed this way, the main challenge, as it was for Joseph, is those people, like his elder brothers, who walk according to the flesh and say, to Moses as to Christ of whom Moses was a shadow “Who made you king over us?” They look, and see no inherent worth in me, and say in their hearts that, without this many years of age, or this much education, or this much exposure to this many things, it cannot possibly be that I am wiser than them.
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<p>I never chose to make myself pious for the words of the Lord. Yet, as Psalm 119 says, “Because of your Law, O Lord, I am wiser than my teachers.” Now, they ignore that no man saves himself from the carnality in which they are involved, to which they are desperately addicted, which I find repugnant, and from which I recoil in horror. The natural man hates the things of God; if I do not, it is because God eternally determined, based on no virtues of mine, to save me from that carnality. Therefore, now, I am wise—the fear of the Lord being the beginning of wisdom—and the only response they muster up is “Your problem is that you think you know everything!” God spares me listening to them another day when they say that, for then my heart starts to despise them greatly. I have never said that I know everything—I have never claimed to be God—but any man who claims it for me, may he be anathema; he has stored up envy and jealousy in his heart, and sinned against his soul. But as for me, I do not have the right to deny that I am wise—I <em>am</em> wise. Indeed, I am wiser than them—there is nothing I can do about that. If I were richer than them, I would confess as much; but I am not. (Usually, also, they are rich, or richer, and they think that this should have a co-relation with wisdom; as though God is a respecter of fiat currency. Haha.) Moreover, God always reserves, and characteristically uses, the His sovereign right to take the weakest and most-unfit thing, and use it most-gloriously—the death of Christ, even the death on a <em>cross</em>, being the ultimate—such that, indeed, it makes me wonder what <em>they</em> expected, what <em>they</em> would have been happy with; that God <em>must</em> (they insist!) put these treasures in jars of gold? They are accursed.
</p>
<p>There is Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. In his account of his life, in Acts, he says that he sat at the feet of Gamaliel—got the best education in his times—and was excellent beyond all his generation, and was zealous for the traditions of his fathers. This another would have credited to his own piousness, especially in light of the fact that Paul went on to fight unto death this same faith in God Who has mercy on whom He will have mercy. “But,” adds Paul, “God, who knew me and called me from before birth …” Even the excellent education choices of Paul’s father for his kids, and the strange and enlightening journey that Paul took, as an enemy to the truth, such that later he was able both to preach at the Areopagus, with references to classic Greek poetry, and lecture in the school of Tyranos for two years (you can bet he was not speaking street Hebrew there), was all designed by God, who calls that which is not as though it is, and commands light out of darkness, and sees the end from the beginning. The problem is not a good/university education, <i>per se</i>, but ultimate rebellion against God, which makes of the education a curse and a grave mistake that leads men away from simple faith and piousness to proud and ignorant sinfulness. Just as the gospel leaves one man, the rebellious reprobate, without excuse and ripe for condemnation, it leaves the other man, the repentant elect, with light in his eyes and quivering before the cross of Christ to the salvation of his soul. These things I say leave men without excuse, for having been literate and yet disregarded the message in the Bible, in favour of the wankery of heathenous and purjurous secularists, for instance, or they leave men convinced that they have been party to the most-pernicious sin that can be committed by the sons of Christian fore-fathers: denying the lordship of Christ, who is Lord over all, for ever and ever, amen.
</p>
<p>I know men on whom God conferred blessings of excellent educations and great wealth; yet they supported and pursued things opposed to the will of God—such as, say, the false modesty and democracy discussed above—and those God has held up before my eyes, saying “See what a curse their blessings have become. For I blessed them, and they turned from my testimonies; though I gave them everything, beyond even their wildest dreams, they reviled my Lordship; and though I glorified them before their nation, they did not glorify my Son before their nation. But for this reason I raised them up, that my glory may be shown in them.” And he hardens whom He wills, and He pities whom He wills. Moreover, He kept me from getting such education and wealth, that my faith may not be in those things, and, lacking them, I may cling ever more to Him; and that no man may say “We made him wise, we made him wealthy,” but that I may be preserved from the temptation of ascribing to flesh what God alone confers, I got no contribution from men, for wisdom or for wealth. You see, the only way to survive temptation is, not in the flesh, but as taught in the Prayer “Our Father in Heaven, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Accursed is every man who looks to his own resources to survive temptation! —For then he has already sinned.<br />
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<p>The most-intriguing thing is that they never stop to ask “How can I be wise, also?” They could commit the sin of Simon, who tried to buy the gifts of the Spirit with money. Or, they could cling to Christ, who Proverbs 8 prophesied as wisdom, and Paul’s epistles taught as wisdom from God. For once a man draws near to God in Christ, all the blessings of God are his. No man will pray to God for wisdom, but will seek it in universities and all sorts of other reprobated places, unless God has turned him to wisdom; but whoever God turns to wisdom, Christ is the first and last stop. “Cast all your cares upon Jesus.” “Does any of you lack anything? Let him ask God.” He who fashioned the smart and the dumb alike, the wise and the foolish, He—even He—will give a spirit of wisdom and skill and understanding. They do not ask me; and since I would point them to Christ, the reprobate would either not ask or not believe. But they lag behind because jealousy and envy blinds their eyes, while I pull ahead by faith in God. Wherefore God has made me wise, and given me authority, and elevated me above my brothers, and glorified me before my nation, that, as a king on the Earth, I may kiss the Son as a sign and warning to all the rest—whether to leave them without excuse, or to give them encouragement to like piousness. Those who are envious and jealous of what God has done for me, to me, that is their problem—and there are many, for I have heard directly from many—but because He decided, and delighted in me, He elected me to these things, and now we all live with the consequences thereof. Shall I live with the consequences of denying His truth—be that of His election, or of my calling? No; I would rather that the wicked reprobates live with the consequences of their walking according to the flesh and not according to the Spirit, and living by sight not by faith.
</p>One Verse and the Oral LawahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgIDW8Z4KDA2015-09-03T06:05:31.0000<p>You may be one of those who know this heretical teaching among the rabbinists—may they be anathema—that God gave Moses two sets of laws: one being the written law, and the other being the oral law. A pair of apologists on the Internet—names of Eitan Bar and Moti Vaknin, if memory serves … heck, <a href="http://www.oneforisrael.org/messiah/">let me find the link</a>—have dealt with this issue, already, <a href="http://www.oneforisrael.org/blog/317">from a well-informed and sufficiently-compassionate angle</a>. There is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xaECHqszFE">a video, which is actually what I watched</a>.
</p>
<p>Nevertheless, as these things go, since it is a blind and accursed heresy, every other page in the Bible screams evidence against it. —But my favourite is Exodus 17:14, where “The Lord said to Moses ‘Write this for a memorial in a book, and speak <i>it</i> in the ears of Joshua …’” That is, though you start an oral tradition by Divine command, yet also record it in a book for a memorial; moreover, the information is that the Lord will “utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under Heaven”, and wage war with Amalek for all generations.
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<p>Such a truth, which shall be evidenced and be fulfilled from generation to generation would very well survive not being written down. It is not nearly as intricate or “random” as the precepts of the Lord that Moses gave the Israelites. And yet, “write it down in a book.” If anything could support the “oral law” heresy, it would be this verse; and yet the verse denounces it roundly, from the mouth of God Himself.
</p>Secularist Christians are AnathemaahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgICJyosKDA2015-09-02T12:19:08.0000<p>I have something in my browser; the kind of thing that is run-of-the-mill for an able analyst of the Middle East these days. It is <a href="http://www.aymennjawad.org/17800/overview-of-some-pro-assad-militias">a coverage of “pro-Assad Militias”</a>, and it is a very interesting launching point for my rant this time.
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<p>As you already know, the Middle East right now is split between islamist rebels and the governments they found in place, which, in the case of Syria and Iraq, are ostensibly secularist. All the armies and factions involved are calling their fallen fighters “martyrs”, and, this being the muslim world, those who are not secular fighters are necessarily muslim fighters. It is secularists against islamists. In fact, even on the side of some secular Arab governments, like in the case of both the nebulous Iraqi state and the Syrian regime, the core fighters are highly-religious Shi’i fighters—called “Popular Mobilisation” in Iraq, raised by the fatwa (religious declaration) of the Ayatollah (top cleric), and Hezbollah and its affiliates in Syria, openly funded and influenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran.<br />
The President of the secular Arab Republic of Syria has severally and repeatedly thanked hard-line religious factions, in momentous public speeches, for their crucial support, and named Hezbollah explicitly. Though that republic is supposed to be secular, its fate is forever tied with the islamic republics and parties that have propped it up.
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<p>Indeed, among the Arab rebel ranks, the ony division serious enough to warrant discussion is Islamic State (Iraq-Syria), on the one hand, and the “moderate” islamists on the other. (Things are a bit more-complex among Kurdish factions, but the point I will raise here is, as you will see, generally-applicable.) Now, as a matter of fact, one is either a muslim or one is not—“moderate” and “extremist” are subjective qualifications that are meaningless outside of a plaintive and deceitful democratic appeal. Being a muslim alone is the farthest extreme possible, because then one has accepted the arch-heretic Mahound Qathem as speaking on behalf of God—this muhammad who committed genocide, beheaded entire tribes, raped nine-year-olds, enjoined murder as sacred duty, and denied the Father and the Son. If one accepts, or continues to accept, such a demoniac as a messenger of God, however tangential, that is an extreme beyond which there is nowhere to go. All islam is extreme heresy.
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<p>Having seen this, then, imagine the stupidity and blindness of the accursed Christians who align themselves with <em>any</em> faction in this fight, other than an explicitly Christian sacralist one! Because if, as a Christian, you will pay the ultimate price, under arms, why do you do it with muslims and for islamism? Do not be unequally yoked with the sons of darkness. Do not yoke an ox and a donkey! What has light got to do with darkness, or Christ with Belial?
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<p>Any Christians who throw their lot in with mozzies are given to the birds of the air, that they may die. They should be fighting mozzies, not with them. Do they not know that <em>their</em> Middle East has been ruined, for centuries and counting, by these self-same mozzies? This heresy swept in and settled; and instead of making the unceasing fight one of unseating the evil, they throw their lot in with the many and rush off to commit sin? From the article linked-to above:
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<blockquote><p>Nusur al-Zawba'a translates as 'The Whirlwind's Eagles', referring to the whirlwind/vortex logo of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). Of all the militias documented here, Nusur al-Zawba'a seems to have fought in the largest number of engagements, spanning the range of western Syria.<br />
…<br />
For instance, the SSNP has built noteworthy support bases in Homs' Old City, the Christian villages of Wadi al-Nasara area and Latakia. It also works alongside other pro-regime factions in Suwayda province. This is so even as strictly speaking, the SSNP's Greater Syrian nationalism is not compatible with Ba'athist Arab nationalism. Sometimes, there is overlap between the SSNP and the regular Syrian armed forces.<br />
…<br />
The SSNP has made particular shows of solidarity with Christians, so its appeal should not be surprising, particularly in western Syria where it seems to offer the only alternative to Arabism, whereas in thenortheast of Syria non-Arab Christian-specific identities- most notably Assyrian and Syriac- have established a much stronger foothold.
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</blockquote><p>Imagine the ridiculousness! And in their death notices, they call these men martyrs, the Christians who die in arms for this faction. Socialist! Secularist! Is it because no Christian man in the Middle East can raise the banners of the Lord? How, then, did Agha Petros—an Assyrian himself—raise it with no Twitter and no Facebook and no AK-47s? They adorn their death notices with the cross, but their hearts detest it; for they die for a feeble mimick of it, the “whirlwind” of the Arab socialists, and neither raise the cross nor wait for one sent to raise it for them. Moreover, they are pro-regime, even though they are not ideologically in line with it—meaning that it is not for the convenience of compatibility with the regime that they chose to fight under this ideology, but rather because they threw their lot in with the many to rush off and commit evil. The martyr Christians are those who say to all the Arab world that, no, we shall not fight for any of you, but against you, until you kiss the Son and raise above our heads His banners and declare here a Christian state, because that alone has the chance of being right. Then the Arabs—muslims almost to a man—would fall upon them in satanic rage and kill all of them: that is the end of a martyr for our faith—not under arms in favour of secularist, socialist stupidity.<br />
Christian sacralism alone is the political ideology that has the chance of being right&mdash;for even when it is wrong, it is rebelling against the truth, and can be corrected thereby, and would improve if it repents, unlike the muslim state which, when it pursues perfection, is murderous, demonised, and heretical, like Islamic State (Iraq-Syria), or worse.
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<p>Moreover, the ranks of the pro-regime factions—and, indeed, many factions outright—are vigorously anti-Israeli; such that even if the regime were to win, it would be a loss for sound doctrine and all the nations of the people of God, both Jew and Gentile—both Assyrian, His handiwork, and Israeli, His inheritance. Having seen the preponderance of Falastin invaders in the regime side—perhaps in response to the regime’s damnable anti-Israelism, which suffices to codemn it before any arms righteously borne—why did they continue in evident sin? Secularism is fine, but for one thing: it is not Christian sacralism. It is not islamist, which is good; but it is not Christian, either, which is damnable. For this reason, secularism is not the extreme sin that islam is, but rather the first sin that a nation commits on its journey towards extreme sin; for once a nation is not Christian, but secularist, it has had its house swept and yet left empty, that worse demonism may invade. All you Christian nations: watch against this sin, which is the first step to your death and destruction! Moreover, one Christian “martyred” under the arms of this accursed faction has this written under his name:
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<blockquote><p>He was martyred in the battles of heroism and resistance in confrontation with the internal Jews.
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</blockquote><p>So you have even been tricked into turning against the olive tree <em>into which you were in-grafted</em> and you think that you will survive? If you think there is some infiltration of some sort being referred-to here, look at the explanation:
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<blockquote><p>The phrase "internal Jews" (yahud al-dakhil) deserves comment here. As my friend and colleague Carl Yonker notes, this language is tied to SSNP founder Antun Sa'adeh's argument that the Jews could not constitute a part of the Greater Syrian nation, as Zionism posits an independent Jewish state in the Israel-Palestine area, while SSNP Greater Syrian nationalism requires these lands to be part of Greater Syria
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</blockquote><p>Also noteworthy, here, is that this means that the Christians here are fighting against the decree of God, for their “Greater Syria” project encompasses classical Judæa, which is legitimately and historically the land of the Jews. They have been tricked by their hardened hearts, following the contraptions of a Falastin reprobate, into warring against God. May they be carrion!<br />
There is no Palestine. There is only Judæa. There are no Palestinians. Only Falastin invaders.
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<p>For one, I will never mourn a Christian who has died fighting either for the secular state, which offends against Psalm 2 and accords Christ a place no higher than the Hagarene heretic Qathem—do they not fear God?—or alongside muslims, for this is a most-accursed heresy. May they all be swiftly killed—may they be anathema—that only a righteous remnant remain, which has not defiled itself with adultery in matters spiritual.
</p>On the Unicomp Keyboard: The Collapse of Standards, Economies, and EmpiresahJzfnRoZS0yN3RoLWNvbXJhZGVyEgsSBUVudHJ5GICAgMC-vYgKDA2015-09-02T10:05:51.0000<p>I am writing this on a new Unicomp 104-key bucking-spring switch keyboard. It is the best keyboard anybody can get on the market right now. If it has any inherent problem with it, it is solved by changing one&rsquo;s attitude or environment, not by changing keyboards. There isn&rsquo;t anything better out there. All the good keyboards are mechanical. If anybody has a problem with that, they need to change the response to the mechanical keyboard, rather than change the keyboard itself. But, alas, all mechanical keyboards are aiming at the Model M as the ideal, whether they know it or not, and they all fall on a continuum between the Model M on the good end, and the worst rubber-dome keyboards on the other end. Bearable non-mechanical keyboards (I think I know of one from Topre, for instance) are still on the bad end, but not at the extreme. Most rubber-dome keyboards are lumped together at the extreme bad end. The Unicomp keyboard, because it uses the Model M&rsquo;s bucking-spring switch, achieves the ideal. Everything else&mdash;and I own actively use all sorts&mdash;is a failure of some degree or other.
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<p>Firstly, it should be considered criminal to teach kids to type with anything but a keyboard that gives tactile feedback, because once they learn the evil habit of bottoming out keys, they hardly unlearn it. And bottoming out keystrokes is the worst typing habit, because it destroys the fingers that do it, on top of resulting in slow typing. It is fine if an adult makes stupid choices, of course, but kids should be spared it. Ideally, no computer should be released with anything simulating a keyboard while being inferior to a Model M; this should just be considered part of the cost of a good, normal, functional computer; and the noise and clickiness of a good keyboard, where that cannot be avoided, should be considered part of normal computer-usage&mdash;as it is for the typewriter. (Silenced guns are good indeed, but noisy guns are normal. So with drills, so with hammers, so with nearly every useful hand tool. Keyboards are hand tools.)
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<p>So, yes, you should start all kids off with something like MX Brown switches, at worst, and bucking-spring switches at best. The problem with MX Blue switches is that they go great lengths to incorporate the audible feedback, essentially just dropping it on top of MX Brown switches, while in fact that cue and response should be absent unless it is just part of the functioning of the switches, as it is in the bucking-spring switch. We should not pursue the audible feedback for itself, but exploit it where it occurs. MX Blue switches seem to suggest that there is something wrong with the tactile-only MX Brown switches, which is not the case. Even the most-silent of rubber-dome switches would be perfect, if it didn&rsquo;t require the sin of bottoming out.
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<p>So, here I sit, typing away at a newly-delivered Unicomp &ldquo;Model M&rdquo; keyboard. It just may well be the best keyboard one can get from Unicomp, because it has a trackball, which, though not as good as a Logitech M570, is good enough that it liberates me from having to plug in the only thing I <em>always</em> plug in&mdash;freeing up a USB port, which are worth their weight in NYSE:AUX, these days. It doesn&rsquo;t have two extra USB ports, like the Das Keyboard alternative I have, but nobody should blame a keyboard for not being a USB hub, especially after it has provided an integrated mouse. The mouse is twitchy and unsteady at times&mdash;this may be my problem, to be resolved with more practice&mdash;and the trackball actually <em>resists</em> coasting, which is unfortunate. &mdash;But it is otherwise a very good mouse, so I am glad to replace the alternative.
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<p>I bought a keyboard cover with it, but it is designed for the 102-key layout. I can&rsquo;t really use that, and I think they do not actually have covers for the 104-key layout. This is a small issue, concerning accessories, not the keyboards itself, so I will let them off the hook. Nevertheless, it exposes the problem that this is simply not a modern keyboard. This is good, because standards have collapsed dramatically since the days when desktop PC keyboards had 102 keys, and were large and majestic, evidently the interface to all that processing power, and designed for the user, who will spend much of his life earning bread with it, rather than the &ldquo;procurement department officer&rdquo; or something. They were full of mechanical engineering, and by their nature they were robust and reliable. Today they are after-thoughts that ruin the fingers that earn the computer in the first place, and they are created like optional peripherals, rather than integral components of the computer system.
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<p>And this is just a symptom of the general collapse in the standards and economies that are most-closely related to the modern computer, mirroring the collapse of the empires with which those standards and economies are associated. There are, for instance, fewer computer-related jobs in the United States of America in this decade than there were in the decade before the Model M keyboard started being produced. In the 1980s, every computer came with a mechanical keyboard, and the Model M was simply the best one of them. Today, Apple pretends that sheen and chrome&mdash;merely good design, even excellent design&mdash;can make up for functional depravity. But if it is up to, say, the computer-related jobs in China, then what do the Chinese even know? Their first exposure to a computer system industry was when Americans <em>wanted it cheap</em>, as is the wont of empires in collapse. In that case, they were even asking for rubber-dome switches from the get-go, such that China, the source of every other computer, the only remaining producer of American-branded computers of names old and new, from Apple to IBM, HP to Dell, has never produced even one bucking-spring switch keyboard. Yet, given the trend and trajectory, China has already replaced America as <em>the</em> empire with whose economy computing standards are associated. It will never be as great as the American one, of which it is merely a vague echo, an entropied and sickly clone, an inconsistent fake, and cheap knock-off. The bucking-spring switch keyboard is, actually, still exclusively manufactured in America&mdash;so, indeed, the collapse in standards represented in the Unicomp keyboards (more on which later) is itself a shiny-clear reflection of the collapse of America herself.
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<p>As mechanical keyboards go, it has only two flaws&mdash;indeed, only one, and its implication.<br />
The flaw is that it is a copy of the Model M, rather than the real thing. The implication is that, apart from the bucking-spring switch itself, everything else is something stuck in a crappy time-warp between the 1980s and the day today. A major symbol&mdash;literally&mdash;of this being-stuck is that the &ldquo;Windows key&rdquo; has on it the logo of Windows 98. Most other keyboards have gone through two or three iterations of that; there is no chance that the Unicomp keyboard will change it any time soon. I bet even the USB connection is USB 1.0, while the other mechanical keyboard I use is USB 3.0.
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<p>The moulds used by Unicomp are the original ones that were used by the Model M, and it shows. But all that is good about a keyboard that is not the Model M, but works like one, is the bucking-spring switch, not the shape or look. Today they have many variants on the general design, and it would not be bad to have a &ldquo;tenkeyless&rdquo; keyboard with bucking-spring switches, but that could not sensibly be the original Model M design&mdash;and should not be.<br />
I know that the concern may be about patents and &ldquo;intellectual property&rdquo; and shit, but that is always just a stupid excuse. The day I can do it, I will stick bucking-spring switches under a normal modern design, moulded fresh, and see who can do anything about it, whining &ldquo;I pee! I pee!&rdquo; and shit. It is a pity no Chinaman has done this already; but I guess it will have to wait for me.<br />
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<p>Moreover, the body itself is not as hefty, thick, heavy, and imposing as the original Model M was. This is not a problem for me, personally, and some people actually would have hated the better-made original, but it makes Unicomp&rsquo;s continued use of the original mould a sad mockery of good workmanship. They&mdash;Unicomp&mdash;confess that the moulding quality is not comparable to other new keyboards, because they use the same old moulds of the original Model M keyboards, which are quite aged by now. Now, it is good that they retain the original Model M design faithfully, even at the expense of perfect-finish moulding. But given that the current keyboards are made of a flimsier plastic than the original reveals how shallow the focus is, on their part; for it was never&mdash;or, at least, should never be&mdash;about the shape of the product. Maybe a core part of their business is supplying replacements, but this all underlines the collapse theme: they seem to have reached that point, in the lifetime of a collapsing system, where recycling and reusing is easier than originality. If they had a robust replacement for the Model M, alike in everything of consequence, but modern and different in the shape and design, just changing connectors and so on would allow those who still have to use the original Model M to replace it, reliably, with the new Unicomp. This would be good workmanship, rather than barbarians recycling, stripping, or mimicking the temples and aqueducts of classical civilisation. It would, in essence, allow the Model M to become obsolete and be replaced by an equal or better thing that looks different. But if you had a Model M, and then had to replace it with the Unicomp, it would be hard to ignore the collapse represented by the flimsier body. Again, this is not an issue for me.
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<p><del>The keycaps do not lift off, like they did in the classical Model M, so if you expect to re-arrange the keyboard layout after market, you are in for a huge disappointment.</del> <ins>They do!</ins> Since the Internet is lacking in sound instruction on this, I will just add this one, from a response from Unicomp support:
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<blockquote><p>The keyboard is made with 2 piece cap and stem assemblies. You should be able to remove the cap using a small screw driver and pry/pop it off from the rear of the cap.<br />
To remove, place a small screwdriver under the front edge of the key and pry upward lightly. Be careful not to flip the key across the room when it comes free.
To install a key, rock the keyboard front to back so the spring pivots freely into the center of the chimney area. It doesn't have to be perfectly centered, just not touching any of the sides. At this point, place the stem of the key into the chimney with the spring riding up into the center of the stem. Press down until it snaps into place. Actuate the button and feel the tactile switch. If you don't feel the snap, remove the key and do it again.
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</blockquote><p>Sensible people, these days, do not use QWERTY. It is as wrong a default as MS-DOS on a PC: you can justify it historically, and it would still be a stupid excuse. QWERTY was wrong on the day it was invented&mdash;it was the wrong solution to the stuck-keys problem in typewriters, and even worse because it was a sufficient solution&mdash;and it is even more-wrong now when there is no utility to it whatsoever.<br />
Yet, though I use Dvorak, I am now typing on QWERTY because I have to enjoy this here keyboard anyway. Thank God that mastering Dvorak, seven or eight years ago, never made me slower on QWERTY. (Oh, it feels good to be touch-typing again, on Dvorak, on such a <em>sound</em> keyboard!)
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<p>So, there we are. I am waiting to see if I can get more information on turning this into a Dvorak keyboard in the field. If I cannot, I could always just blot out the offensive characters and write Dvorak on them. (I am not really a touch-typist; I do refer to the keyboard, although only rarely. This may be what allows me to retain fluency on QWERTY and Dvorak.) Now that I have ranted thus, I just may feel better about whatever I next decide to do with this here keyboard; even getting a replacement.
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